Google announces business app store for Google Apps

Tom Krazit at CNET News – Google announces business app store for Google Apps:

"Scott Farquhar, CEO of software tools company Atlassian, showed how Google Apps can be integrated directly into his company's software development tools. For example, software developers using Atlassian's project-management tools can have Gmail, Google Calendar, and Google Chat applications integrated directly into the software development tool, so they don't have to leave that window to check their e-mail or chat with colleagues."

Five Pervasive Myths About Older Software Developers

Dave Rodenbaugh – Five Pervasive Myths About Older Software Developers:

"Experienced software developers smell crap a mile away.  […]  They won’t put up with managers asking them to work 80 hours a week because the customer wants the software next month and they already told you it will take 3 more months to complete with the features agreed upon.

Younger developers haven’t been in those situations as frequently and therefore, have less resistance to bad management practices.  The only desirable trait management wants here is naivete.  If you want a great team and great products coming out of it, having people that can call you out on bad decisions will save your bacon again and again."

Giving Up On Patents

Tim Bray – Giving Up On Patents:

"The patent system needs to be torn down and thrown out.

[…] And here are a few words for the huge community of legal professionals who make their living pursuing patent law: You’re actively damaging society. Look in the mirror and find something better to do."

Quote: The thing [our clients] bring to the table

Ryan Singer cites Eric Evans' Putting the model to work presentation at Signal vs. Noise – Quote: The thing [our clients] bring to the table:

"We need to be good enough to know how to do the implementation. But the thing that we bring that’s really critical to the process is we think sharply. We are able to abstract and we are able to define things crisply."

Headcount

Joel Spolsky – Headcount:

"If everybody in the world knew about your software and was encouraged to evaluate it, the number that would buy it would be (Earth population) x Quality.

[…] Double the quality, and the same sales effort yields double the revenue.

[…] The offshoring that does happen is strongly biased to custom software development which, by design, can only solve one person’s problem, so more developers than marketers are needed."

The Listening Engine

Tim Bray – The Listening Engine:

"I’ve come to expect, of my technical and business peers, that they will be well-informed to an extent that would have been very rare even a couple of decades ago. Can you skip this and still make a difference in the world? I don’t know, but it does seem that we are sorting ourselves into tribes based on the intensity of our listening."

Microsoft dropping FAST search for Linux, Unix

Shalin Shekhar Mangar – Microsoft dropping FAST search for Linux, Unix:

"According to a blog post from Microsoft Distinguished Engineer and CTO, FAST Bjørn Olstad, the 2010 products will be the last to have a search core that runs on Linux and UNIX.

Being involved in Apache Solr and the newly formed Lucene Connectors Framework (LCF) project, I’m very interested in the implications."

It's not a promise, it's a guess

David Heinemeier Hansson at Signal vs. Noise – It's not a promise, it's a guess:

"Since nobody likes to be a failure, they’ll indulge in risky behavior to avoid it, like burning the midnight oil and checking in bad code with shanty or no tests.

Rushing to meet your estimate promise once or twice might be bearable, but it’s ultimately unsustainable. Software development is inherently unpredictable. There are just too many moving parts and ice tips that turn out to be icebergs."

The iPad is real-life social

Edd Dumbill at O'Reilly Radar - The iPad is real-life social:

"After reading one such blog post saying that the iPad was antisocial, because it didn't have SMS or the ability to run IM in the background, it struck me this was a restricted view of what it means to be social.

The iPad is real-life social in a way that a phone and a laptop just aren't. You really can just hand it to someone to show them what you mean: share photos, videos, writing with real people right next to you."

The iPad Is The Gadget We Never Knew We Needed

Wilson Rothman at Gizmodo – The iPad Is The Gadget We Never Knew We Needed:

"The iPad has shortcomings, but they only betray Apple's caution, just like what happened with iPhone No. 1. Now every 15-year-old kid asks for an iPhone, and the ones that don't get them get iPod Touches.

We can sit here in our geeky little dorkosphere arguing about it all day, but as much as Apple clearly enjoys our participation, the people Jobs wants to sell this to don't read our rants. They can't even understand them. My step-mother refuses to touch computers, but nowadays checks email, reads newspapers and plays Solitaire on an iPod Touch, after basically picking it up by accident one day. That's a future iPad user if I ever saw one."

iPad About

Stephen Fry – iPad About:

"Like iPhone 1.0 […] iPad 1.0 is still fantastic enough in its own right to be classed as a stunningly exciting object, one that you will want NOW and one that will not be matched this year by any company.

[…] And being Apple it hasn’t been released without (you can be sure) Steve Jobs being wholly convinced that it was ready. “Not good enough, start again. Not good enough. Not good enough. Not good enough.” How many other CEOs say until their employees want to murder them? That’s the difference."

The 6 hidden costs of running a DAM system

TWEAK Digital – The 6 hidden costs of running a DAM system:

"For some reason, desktop applications are just accepted as-is. DAM software is expected to do everything imaginable and be easily customizable."

Show and Sell: The Secret to Apple's Magic

Joel Johnson at Gizmodo – Show and Sell: The Secret to Apple's Magic:

"Consumer audiences have grown wary of nearly a century of predictable sleight-of-hand. We've seen too many companies promise us the future, then fail to deliver it.

I believe that there are dozens of companies out there with the talent to pull the future toward us along some retail tesseract. But until they conquer their stage fright, leave aside the vaudevillian antics that savvy, jaded audiences no longer find compelling, and embrace a more honest and practical sort of conjuration, Apple will continue to be the defining technology performance of our age."

You can always do less

David Heinemeier Hansson at Signal vs. Noise – You can always do less:

 "Most software has a tiny essence that justifies its existence, everything after that is wants and desires mistaken for needs and necessities.

The easiest way to force the insight of what can be lived without is by playing a game of constraints: You have to ship on Friday, you can’t add more people, you can’t work nights. […] It’s amazing how creative the cuts and sharp the sacrifices become when you’re backed into a corner."

The next big thing will start out looking like a toy

Chris Dixon – The next big thing will start out looking like a toy:

"To distinguish toys that are disruptive from toys that will remain just toys, you need to look at products as processes. Obviously, products get better inasmuch as the designer adds features, but this is a relatively weak force. Much more powerful are external forces: microchips getting cheaper, bandwidth becoming ubiquitous, mobile devices getting smarter, etc. For a product to be disruptive it needs to be designed to ride these changes up the utility curve.

Social software is an interesting special case where the strongest forces of improvement are users’ actions."

(Via Digital Asset Management.)

Doing It Wrong

Tim Bray – Doing It Wrong:

"What I’m writing here is the single most important take-away from my Sun years, and it fits in a sentence: The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise.

[…] The point is that that kind of thing simply cannot be built if you start with large formal specifications and fixed-price contracts and change-control procedures and so on. So if your enterprise wants the sort of outcomes we’re seeing on the Web (and a lot more should), you’re going to have to adopt some of the cultures and technologies that got them built."

Managing Bob

Luke Welling at PHP Advent 2009 – Managing Bob:

"Bob notices uptime, how long seemingly minor change requests take to implement, consistency in the UI, crashes, revenue, and conversion rates. He will notice the symptoms of bad code, even if he does not have the knowledge to diagnose the root cause, or the vocabulary to request the cure.

[…] Extracting real, actionable requirements from Bob, setting realistic expectations, and either meeting those original expectations or keeping the project on track as things change is a big part of success. Manage new information, new feature requests, and change requests while either coming in on time or resetting Bob’s expectations in advance."

What is Lean about the Lean Startup?

Kent Beck at Lessons Learned – What is Lean about the Lean Startup?:

"Another basic principle of TPS [the Toyota Production System] is respect for people. One form of respect is not wasting the time of people who are creating new products and services. Another form of respect is inviting customers to be part of the process of creating those products and services."

Why I gave away my company to charity

Derek Sivers – Why I gave away my company to charity:

"I get the deeper happiness of knowing the lucky streak I've had in my life will benefit tons of people - not just me.

I get the pride of knowing I did something irreversibly smart before I could change my mind."

Trust but verify

Derek Sivers – Trust but verify:

"But a few devastating times, I found out that I had tried too hard not to micro-manage. I hadn’t managed at all. I had said something once, thought it was understood and agreed, and assumed the best.

[…] In all of the cases, a simple one-minute verification along the way would have prevented everything."

When and How to Micromanage

Joel Spolsky at Inc. – When and How to Micromanage:

"I care. Ryan cares. Our staffs care. The venue manager might care but doesn't know enough. The AV people he hired? Sometimes, they officially Don't Care, Don't Know How to Do Their Job, and Really Just Want to Go on Break. And the minute you cross that line, from the people who care to the people who want to go home, that's when you have to micromanage. You have to check in on people and inspect their work and sign contracts in blood demanding that if the Wi-Fi isn't perfect, it'll be free."

If Newspapers Were Stores, Would Visitors Be “Worthless” Then?

Danny Sullivan – If Newspapers Were Stores, Would Visitors Be “Worthless” Then?:

"Yeah, in an article about how people can’t afford their homes, you show me an ad about buying an “iconic residential masterpiece” in Boca Raton. And when I don’t click on that, because it has nothing to do with my interests, you call me a freeloader.

Your loss, I think. I’ve got money to spend. Plenty of your visitors do. You’re just not figuring out how to get it from me.

[…] Do something. Anything. Please. Survive. But there’s one thing you shouldn’t do. Blame others for sending you visitors and not figuring out how to make money off of them."

The danger of releasing too early

Gojko Adzic – The danger of releasing too early:

"We should prioritise projects to be able to release early something that is genuinely useful, not partial functionality that is useless on its own. If we’re building a car for someone, it makes no sense to ask them to prioritise between breaks or steering in the first iteration, clients will just tell us that both are required."

Apache Solr 1.4.0 Offically Released

Grant Ingersoll – Apache Solr 1.4.0 Offically Released:

"New Solr 1.4 features include
- Major performance enhancements in indexing, searching, and faceting
- Revamped all-Java index replication that’s simple to configure and
can replicate config files
- […] Dynamic search results clustering via Carrot2
- Multi-select faceting (support for multiple items in a single
category to be selected)"

Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?

Joel Spolsky at Inc. – Does Slow Growth Equal Slow Death?:

"You worked hard to build your business; you're counting on it for your retirement and your kids' college and whatever. But if you're not taking any risks, you're pretty much guaranteed to fail. Somewhere, there's someone out there who is taking more risks than you, and that person's business is growing faster than yours, and that person's business may one day come to dominate your industry while yours withers away."

Using nonfunctional requirements to build better software

Andrew Stellman at Building Better Software – Using nonfunctional requirements to build better software:

"One of those senior architects I mentioned gave me a really good tip recently, one that really rings true. He told me, “Always think about performance from day one of your project, and test for it until you deliver.”

[…] I like the fact that he’s thinking about how well the software works from the beginning of the project.

[…] The other thing I like is that he didn’t say, “Think about performance, scalability, usability, robustness, etc., from the beginning of the project.” He narrowed it down to the single quality attribute that was most important to his particular project."

Fast by Default and Web Performances

Ajaxian – Fast by Default and Web Performances, on a slide by Steve Souder of Google:

"SPEED is the next competitive advantage – use it … before someone else does"

Commercial software I'm running on my Mac

• Adobe Flex Builder
• Omni Group OmniGraffle
  
• TechSmith Camtasia for Mac
  
• VMware Fusion (and Windows XP running in a VM)
  

That's all. (As an Adobe partner, our company also has licenses for developing and testing against the Adobe Creative Suite but that's not what I use to get my work done.)

It's great that developing software (at least the web-based kind we're doing) requires almost no investments these days, aside from hardware and an Internet connection! I remember very well how frustrated I was (as a pupil and student) for not being able to program because serious money was being charged for IDEs and compilers…

Solr heads for an even sunnier future

Kas Thomas at CMS Watch – Solr heads for an even sunnier future:

"Anyone who's been watching the search space for a while knows that Apache Solr -- the popular open-source search server built on Lucene -- is the elephant in the room for a great many product-selection teams these days. It may be an exaggeration to say that most product-selection discussions begin with "What about Solr?" But not by much.

The release of Solr 1.4 will no doubt only intensify debates over the virtues of build versus buy and open source versus vendor lock."

Capstone projects and time management

Joel Spolsky – Capstone projects and time management:

"College students in their final year have about 16 years of experience doing short projects and leaving everything until the last minute.

[…] This might be a neat opportunity to use Scrum.

[…] I’ve been blaming students, here, for lacking the discipline to do term-length projects throughout the term, instead of procrastinating, but of course, the problem is endemic among non-students as well. It’s taken me a while, but I finally learned that long-term deadlines (or no deadlines at all) just don’t work with professional programmers, either: you need a schedule of regular, frequent deliverables to be productive over the long term."

A real Customer Advisory Board

Eric Ries – A real Customer Advisory Board:

"In a previous company, we put together a group of passionate early adopters. […] Every two months, the company would have a big end-of-milestone meeting, with our Board of Directors, Business Advisory Board, and all employees present. At this meeting, we’d present a big package of our progress over the course of the cycle. And at each meeting, we’d also include an unedited, uncensored report direct from the Customer Advisory Board.

[…] It’s a lot harder to claim everything is going smoothly, and that customers are dying for Random New Feature X when the report clearly articulates another point of view. Sometimes the right thing to do is to ignore the report. After all, listening to customers is not intrinsically good. As always, the key is to synthesize the customer feedback with the company’s unique vision. But that’s often used as an excuse to ignore customers outright. I know I was guilty of this many times. It’s all-too-easy to convince yourself that customers will want whatever your latest brainstorm is. And it’s so much more pleasant to just go build it, foist it on the community, and cross your fingers. It sure beats confronting reality, right?"

Seven key agile testing practices for releasable software

Gojko Adzic cites Elisabeth Hendrikson's keynote at the Agile Testing Days – Seven key agile testing practices for releasable software:

"Agile software teams deliver value in the form of releasable software at frequent regular intervals (at least monthly), at a sustainable pace, while adapting to the changing needs of the business. […] Bottom line is delivering releasable software at least monthly. Releasable in this case means that we actually know that it is going what we wanted it to do. Delivering frequently is not let’s ship it and see what happens. It’s not releasable until it’s Done. Done means both implemented and tested."

Mechanical Turk app on the iPhone Provides Work for Refugees

Ben Lorica at O'Reilly Radar – Mechanical Turk app on the iPhone Provides Work for Refugees:

"The turks in the refugee camps are recent graduates of Samasource's computer training program. Rather than sitting idly while they wait to be employed, they earn money performing simple computer tasks for real companies. On the other hand, Give Work app users volunteer to perform simple tasks on their iPhone knowing that refugees in Africa are benefiting. CrowdFlower founder Lukas Biewald notes that their work with Samasource opens up their platform to companies who want to tap into and help micro-workers in developing countries."

AIR 2 Enhancements Complete Overview

Elad Elrom at InsideRIA – AIR 2 Enhancements Complete Overview:

"File promises is a new API (URLFilePromise) that allows you to access resources at a certain URL and drag them out of the AIR application as a file promise into the local machine. Once the files are dropped the request will be made to download the file to your local machine.

[…] Adobe AIR 2.0 uses the same branch of WebKit as Safari 4 beta […]. The most significant feature of using this branch of WebKit is the usages of SquirrelFish Extreme (SFX), which has been integrated into the WebKit engine and increases the overall performance of Webkit. "

Collaboration Is Just Good Business

Mike Milinkovich – Collaboration Is Just Good Business:

"We all collectively waste massive amounts of human and commercial capital by building too much software. The sheer amount of wastefully duplicated effort endemic to the ICT industry is staggering.

[…] In my view, the future impact of open source on the ICT industry is not simply to make software better quality. It is to reduce the amount of wasteful effort squandered on implementing and re-implementing and re-implementing yet again the same bags of stuff that our current corporately-silo’d development structures require."

MAX 2009: Adobe AIR 2.0 and iPhone support

Arno Gourdol – MAX 2009: Adobe AIR 2.0 and iPhone support:

"At MAX this week we’re showing a preview of AIR 2.0, codenamed Athena. We’ve added tons of cool new features, but first, we’ve worked on reducing the memory and CPU usage for a lot of AIR applications. We’ve also listened to what our developers were asking for and we’re adding some of the most popular features:

• native code integration: you can invoke native code from your AIR application
• […] support to open documents with their native applications
• […] much improved networking APIs, including support for UDP, TLS (encrypted binary sockets), DNS lookups, IPv6 and more"
  

The new rules of news

Dan Gillmor at guardian.co.uk – The new rules of news:

"Transparency would be a core element of our journalism. One example of many: every print article would have an accompanying box called "Things We Don't Know," a list of questions our journalists couldn't answer in their reporting. TV and radio stories would mention the key unknowns. Whatever the medium, the organisation's website would include an invitation to the audience to help fill in the holes, which exist in every story."

The Mythical Customer Problem

Gojko Adzic – The Mythical Customer Problem:

"Customer is a role, not a person. Very often it can’t be a single person – a domain expert that should ideally be on site is seldom the executive project sponsor who has the authority to approve cost or change plans. One group of people will know how the process works at the moment but another will have a vision what the new system improves. In any non-trivial business specialists focus on particular parts of their domain, so any single person will not know all the details of all the problems."

David Hoover's Top 5 Tips for Apprentices

James Turner at O'Reilly Radar – David Hoover's Top 5 Tips for Apprentices:

"Hoover says that most developers have benefited from one or two key people in their career that helped them move along. "For people that had had successful careers, they only point back to one or two people that mentored them for a certain amount of time, a significant amount of time, a month, two months, a year in their careers."

[…] For Hoover, one strategy that pays off is to not try and be the most experienced person in a group, but the least. "For me, I didn't really get good solid mentorship until I was able to leave that company and get to another company where I could basically try to be the worst. I wanted to get onto a team where I wasn't the three-year programmer who was suddenly senior application developer. I wanted to be on a team where as a three-year programmer, I was junior.

[…] Especially at the beginning of your career, you've got to be looking for situations where you can expose yourself to new senior developers and learn their tricks because they're going to have a billion little tricks that they don't even know about, that they wouldn't even be able to tell you about because it's just so ingrained in the way they work.

[…] You should be comparing yourself to masters which are people that are out there doing great work and potentially speaking about it or writing books about it. […] If you want to achieve mastery of this craft, that's who you should be comparing yourself to."

Flax

Adobe PDF Library SDK

The Duct Tape Programmer

Joel Spolsky – The Duct Tape Programmer:

"Zawinski popularized Richard Gabriel’s precept of Worse is Better. A 50%-good solution that people actually have solves more problems and survives longer than a 99% solution that nobody has because it’s in your lab where you’re endlessly polishing the damn thing. Shipping is a feature. A really important feature. Your product must have it."

Stop Giving the Newspapers Your Advice - They Don’t Need It

Joshua-Michéle Ross at O'Reilly Radar – Stop Giving the Newspapers Your Advice - They Don’t Need It:

"The failure of newspapers is not a failure of imagination or foresight nor is it a failure of individuals. This kind of failure is the hallmark of all institutions in the face of tectonic disruption. Institutions are a set of agreements that perpetuate a social order beyond individual intention or tenure. Changing those agreements is costly and time-consuming. So when the rate of change accelerates beyond the institution’s adaptive capacity - extinction follows.

The question is not “what should newspapers do?” but “how can a large institution effectively organize in response to disruptive change?” Taken thus, it is not only the fundamental question to ask of newspapers."

Why you shouldn't do it all yourself

Stormy Peters – Why you shouldn't do it all yourself:

"If I do it all myself, the GNOME Foundation will always need me. I hope to be part of the GNOME community for a long time but I think you do the best job you can when you work yourself out of a job whether it's because you solved the original problem or you automate everything. There's always more work to do, more problems to solve. You shouldn't be solving the same problems year after year."

Healthcare

Scott Adams – Healthcare:

"A confusopoly - a term I concocted several years ago - is any industry that intentionally makes its products and services too complicated for comparison shopping. The best examples of confusopolies are cell phone carriers and insurance companies. And health insurance companies might be the most confusing confusopoly of all. I suspect that no individual has the knowledge, time, and information necessary to effectively compare two health insurance plans. And in that environment the free market doesn't operate efficiently."

Mac OSX using vmware fusion : network is down

Jettro – Mac OSX using vmware fusion : network is down:

 "It turns out that Mac OSX sometimes thinks that vmware’s virtual network is down. The following command tells it otherwise.

sudo /sbin/ifconfig vmnet8 up"

Where did all the HTML editors go?

Adriaan Bloem at CMS Watch – Where did all the HTML editors go?:

"By now, all but a few CMS products have thrown in the towel. You can have whatever UI you want, but the editor is likely going to be either TinyMCE or FCKeditor.

[…] The real consolidation isn't in products or projects; it's in components. Know about Lucene and Solr; and Tiny or FCK -- and spend your time on the real differences."

Agile Context Switching with "The Disturbed"

Charles Miller at the Atlassian Developer Blog – Agile Context Switching with "The Disturbed":

"Programmers, the authors proposed, are at their most efficient when they reach a state of 'flow' in which they are able to concentrate fully on a single problem. Any developer will tell you how satisfying it is to be in this state, how productive it is... and how easy it is to be pulled out of it by the smallest interruption. What's worse, since it takes at least fifteen minutes to reach this level of concentration, any interruption no matter how small can cost you a quarter hour's productivity. A constant stream of small interruptions, say a phone near your desk that rings just twice an hour, can make a developer unproductive (and miserable) for most of the day.

Our solution […] was to designate a single developer to be "The Disturbed"; taking a two week stint to act as a magnet for all the questions, requests and distractions that would otherwise be distributed across the whole team. […] Because the Disturbed isn't expecting (or expected) to get much of that work done while being disturbed, it is far less frustrating for the developer and far more predictable in terms of scheduling and estimation for the team as a whole."

Software development with hunters and gatherers

Gojko Adzic – Software development with hunters and gatherers:

"While talking about the value of quick feedback and short iterations, David [Evans] used an analogy which I haven’t heard before and I liked it very much, so I decided to share it on this blog.

[…] What’s really important in the story is what happens at the end of the day if things don’t go according to plan: It’s OK if you don’t quite fill the the basket. It’s not OK if you don’t quite catch the animal."

Snakes on the Web

Jacob Kaplan-Moss – Snakes on the Web:

"Some time ago, Leonard Lin collected this list of all of this “other stuff” you need to worry about after developing your app: […] The good news is that there’s open source software to fill all of these needs. The bad news is that they’re all immature, disparate pieces with no connections to each other. Getting even half of this stuff up, running, and integrated is a monumental task.

[…] Frameworks ought to gracefully fade away as you replace them, bit by bit, with domain-specific code. […] Right now, they don’t."

Strategy: Solve Only 80 Percent of the Problem

Todd Hoff at High Scalability – Strategy: Solve Only 80 Percent of the Problem:

"Sometimes as programmers we are blinded by the glory of the challenge of solving the 100% solution when there's a more reasonable, rational alternative that's almost as good. Something to keep in mind when you are wondering how you'll possibly get it all done. Don't even try."

Vim tips: The basics of search and replace

Another thing I keep forgetting in vi / vim:

 :%s/search/replace/g

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier at Linux.com – Vim tips: The basics of search and replace

SSH login without password

 I keep forgetting this line…

 cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub | ssh user@host 'cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys'

Thanks to Mathias Kettner – SSH login without password.

Twelve dollars for five words? What is the Associated Press thinking?

Jason Morrison – Twelve dollars for five words? What is the Associated Press thinking?:

"No, I am not making this up. The AP is really asking people to pay them $12.50 if they quote more than four words of any story.

[…] How would the AP operate if every source they quoted demanded payment up front?"

Thinking beyond the RFP

Kas Thomas at CMS Watch – Thinking beyond the RFP:

"Don't ask "How will you be able to handle XYZ?" unless you're willing to tolerate answers like "Our standard user interface allows a user to do this" or "our application programming interface allows the product to be easily extended so as to accomplish this."

Instead, write a user narrative or concrete scenario for every one of your key requirements, and demand a narrative answer in response. For example, rather than ask whether a product natively supports delegation of authority in workflows, compose a concrete user narrative."

The Steve Jobs method

Eric Ries – The Steve Jobs method:

"Having so few products means Apple can dedicate enormous resources to each project once it gets the green light. But it also means they have to be very careful kill projects if they are not trending towards something great. Which comes to the second major principle: halt work that leads to more waste, even if it means abandoning sunk costs."

My Sys-Con Nightmare

Aral Balkan – My Sys-Con Nightmare:

"It all started at the end of March, 2009, when I discovered that I was listed as an author on a site called Ulitzer. They had used my name as a subdomain on their site […] and the site presented a photo of me, stating that I had been an author with them for several years. They had also scraped my blog posts and were reproducing them on the site under a different license to the one that I had published them under.

Beyond simply using my content without permission, they had misappropriated my identity by stating that I was one of their authors. And I wasn't the only one."

If You Want to Write Useful Software, You Have to Do Tech Support

Nick Bradbury – If You Want to Write Useful Software, You Have to Do Tech Support:

"If you really want to write useful software, stop spending all your time keeping up with technology.  Don't worry if your resume isn't filled with the latest buzzwords.  Instead, invest your time in talking with your customers. They don't care what programming language you use - they only care whether your software meets their needs, and the best way to ensure that is by breaking out of your cone of silence and opening the lines of communication."

Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule

Paul Graham – Maker's Schedule, Manager's Schedule:

"I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there's sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I'm slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning. I know this may sound oversensitive, but if you're a maker, think of your own case. Don't your spirits rise at the thought of having an entire day free to work, with no appointments at all? Well, that means your spirits are correspondingly depressed when you don't. And ambitious projects are by definition close to the limits of your capacity. A small decrease in morale is enough to kill them off."

Shut up! Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them.

Derek Sivers – Shut up! Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them.:

"Four different tests of 63 people found that those who kept their intentions private were more likely to achieve them than those who made them public and were acknowledged by others.

Once you’ve told people of your intentions, it gives you a “premature sense of completeness.”"

Beyond celebrity obsession

Doc Searls – Beyond celebrity obsession:

"The Net maximizes the endlessness of choice about how we spend our time. It also maximizes many kinds of productiveness. Nearly all the code we are using, right now, to do stuff on the Net, was written by many collaborators across many distances. Some were obsessing about what they were producing. Others were just working away. Either way, they chose to be productive. To contribute. To work on what works."

Nine Essential Truths for Entrepreneurial Success

Mark Sigal – Nine Essential Truths for Entrepreneurial Success:

"Make sure that your product planning process is defined in a way that codifies specific use cases supported by clear workflows (in terms of click steps), backed by wireframes that express same. This is the ultimate 'rubber meets the road' moment when you realize that you are either talking the same language with your constituency of co-workers, customers, partners and investors, or not.

[…] In thinking about your product or service, always know what jobs you are focusing on, how they enable the outcome you are pledging to deliver and how they stick within the constraints your customer faces. "

The Internet’s Payload

Tim Bray – The Internet’s Payload:

"Social networking gives me the warm-and-fuzzies and YouTube shows me what happened today in Iran, but action only comes from understanding and understanding only comes from explanation and explanation only happens in words.

[…] And by the way, I’d rather have the text of Clay’s speech than the video. For things that matter, written words are unambiguously better than speech. To start with, anything that matters isn’t just written, it’s usually rewritten repeatedly (and more important, condensed). Plus, it has hyperlinks."

Eric Evans: Why do efforts to replace legacy systems fail?

Gojko Adzic – Eric Evans: Why do efforts to replace legacy systems fail?:

"Starting from a proposition that “not all of a large system will be well designed”, Evans suggested identifying and focusing on the core domain – a very small piece of software that actually makes the system really worth writing, something that brings direct competitive advantage to the business. These are most likely those new and really exciting features that people plan to do after the functionality of the legacy system was fully replaced."

Vignette bets big on beta-SaaS

Kas Thomas at CMS Watch – Vignette bets big on beta-SaaS:

"For getting a handle on major new functionalities -- and for finding out quickly whether your content contributors, admins, power users, and developers are going to run into any showstoppers -- the VVE approach will likely prove useful.

Meanwhile, it's a potential cost- and time-saver for customers. There are, after all, significant hardware and software implementation costs involved in standing up even a relatively modest beta test environment. With a hosted beta, the vendor eats the setup and operational costs. The customer comes in with guns blazing. Everyone gets where they need to go a little bit faster."

Url Shorteners: Destroying the Web Since 2002

Jeff Atwood – Url Shorteners: Destroying the Web Since 2002:

"The web is little more than a maze of hyperlinks, and if you can insert yourself as an intermediary in that maze, you can transform or undermine the experience in fundamental ways. […] Every tiny URL is another baby step towards destroying the web as we know it."

Jeff Bezos at Wired Disruptive by Design conference

Tim O'Reilly quotes Jeff Bezos – Jeff Bezos at Wired Disruptive by Design conference:

"You've got to be willing to learn new skills if your customers need you to have those skills."

Why Google Bothered to Appeal a $761 Small Claims Case (and Won)

Aaron Greenspan – Why Google Bothered to Appeal a $761 Small Claims Case (and Won):

"Google has more access to information about people than virtually any company on the planet, yet despite its vast resources, it found it more prudent to fabricate disparaging innuendo about me before a judge. The sole purpose was to damage my credibility."

Enterprise search doesn't mean mortaging the farm

Enterprise Search – Enterprise search doesn't mean mortaging the farm:

"So before you decide you need to budget a half million dollars or more for search, consider what Walter Underwood, chief architect of Ultraseek and now search evangelist at Netflix once told me. Paraphrasing: “You can download Solr then spend a ton of money customizing it; or you can spend a ton of money licensing enterprise search software, then spend a ton of money installing and customizing it. Your call.”"

Rebooting my 2002-2006 archive

Jon Udell – Rebooting my 2002-2006 archive:

"I’m glad I’m not in publishing anymore. It turns out to be a lousy way to keep your stuff published."

Teamwork

Scott Adams – Teamwork:

"The dominant team members will get their way over the objections of the meek, no matter how competent the meek might be.

[…] All meetings last longer than they should."

Less Like Oration

Tim Bray – Less Like Oration:

"The Net has had a twofold effect on short-form publishing: First, it’s cheap, verging on free. Second, it enjoys many routes to potentially large audiences. It’s the second that’s interesting. Until recently, you simply couldn’t find a large audience for your thoughts unless you had books on shelves in stores, and books had to be a couple of hundred pages long (usually more) to get on shelves in stores. This resulted, among other things, in many unnecessarily thick books."

Fear is the mind-killer

Eric Ries – Fear is the mind-killer:

"When a new engineer started at IMVU, I had a simple rule: they had to ship code to production on their first day. […] For some, this was an absolutely terrifying experience. "What if I take the site down?!" was a common refrain. I tried to make sure we always gave the same answer: "if you manage to take the site down, that's our fault for making it too easy. Either way, we'll learn something interesting."

Lessons Learned from Previous Employment

Adam Shand – Lessons Learned from Previous Employment:

•  "Surviving the loss of a key person, is never as hard as you think it will be.
• […] The one thing that managers hate, more than anything else, is being surprised.
• […] Everything takes longer than you expect. Lots longer.
• […] One of the primary jobs of a leader is to act as a "lightning rod" for discussion. As such it is often more important to have an opinion, than to have the correct opinion.
• […] Every company is held together by the supreme efforts of certain key people.
• […] The primary job of salesmen is to navigate their own companies bureaucracy on behalf of their customers."

Exploring Lucene and Solr’s TrieRange Capabilities

Grant Ingersoll – Exploring Lucene and Solr’s TrieRange Capabilities:

"Now, however, thanks to the new org.apache.lucene.search.trie package (currently located in the contrib/queries area of Lucene, but it may move to the Lucene core, see below) and it’s addition to Solr via a FieldType, Lucene and Solr users can take advantage of much faster range searches."

Can the Noosphere Save Us?

Jon Udell – Can the Noosphere Save Us?:

"We are all continually discovering useful knowledge that we want to share. Until very recently, it was costly to transmit that knowledge beyond the local sphere: friends, family, tribe. Now, suddenly, it's free to address the whole world. The only cost is your time. Of course that is the scarcest commodity. But you already invest your time in the crafting of messages that you deliver only to the few. When appropriate, consider placing those messages in online venues where they can also inform the many."

Dreaming of Rails as the Next Microsoft Access

Simon St. Laurent – Dreaming of Rails as the Next Microsoft Access:

"The general practice set by Access's creators from the beginning was to do as much as possible through visual interfaces rather than through code. In that, perhaps more than anything else, they struck a balance that made Access approachable while still letting it be powerful.

Rails culture runs the other direction. GUIs are the end product, but the code is pretty much all plain text. There are some tools for creating Rails forms out there, but an amazing number of developers work through text editors.

[…] Those barriers leave me stuck dreaming. I'm now as comfortable working in Rails as I ever was in Access, but there aren't a lot of direct paths from here to there. I'd love to see someone write an interface for Rails interface development that feels like Access, but there's no question it would be a difficult challenge."

Announcing the date of the FOSS revolution: 2032!

Rick Jelliffe at O'Reilly Broadcast – Announcing the date of the FOSS revolution: 2032!:

"So why is retirement important? It is because I suspect that if FOSS can present itself in a form that is convenient and fun for retirees to take up as a hobby, it will have access to an incredible reserve army of unemployed talent and knowledge.

[…] I think the time will come when the sheer numbers of sedentary, programming savvy, underemployed, volunteer-minded retirees will require different organization of FOSS projects."

rrdtool

I keep forgetting how to get started with the wonderful rrdtool, so here's a note to myself for the next time (and here's the tutorial)…

I'm creating a database with these characteristics:

• a single, once every 10 minute measured gauge named "num" which is OK with up to 20 minute gaps between values
• 10 minute resolution stored for one week
• 1 hour resolution for one month
• 1 day resolution for three years
  

rrdtool create counter.rrd --step 600 DS:num:GAUGE:1200:0:U RRA:LAST:0.5:1:1008 RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:6:744 RRA:AVERAGE:0.5:144:1095

Inserting the current value:

rrdtool update counter.rrd N:`echo 'select count(JOB_ID) from DCX_JOB where JOB_STATUS = 1;' | mysql -h localhost -P 3306 -u username -psecret dbname -s`

Creating a graph as a PNG file:

rrdtool graph counter.png DEF:val=counter.rrd:num:LAST LINE2:val#FF0000 

Validated learning about customers

Eric Ries – Validated learning about customers:

"The problem stems from selling each customer a custom one-time product. This is the magic of sales: by learning about each customer in-depth, they can convince each of them that this product would solve serious problems. That leads to cashing many checks. […] They are closing orders. They are gaining valuable customer data. They are close to breakeven. What’s the problem?

[…] Stories like these are what has led me to this definition of progress for a startup: validated learning about customers.

[…] This unit of progress is remarkable in several ways. First of all, it means that most aggregate measures of success, like total revenue, are not very useful. They don’t tell us the key things we need to know about the business: how profitable is it on a per-customer basis? What’s the total available market? What’s the ROI on acquiring new customers? And how do existing customers respond to our product over time?

Secondly, this definition locates progress firmly in the heads of the people inside the company, and not in any artifacts the company produces. That’s why none of dollars, milestones, products or code can count as progress."

EtherPad

"EtherPad lets multiple people work on the same text simultaneously.

[…] Insanely useful for Meeting notes, Conference calls.

[…]  No account required. The only really real-time collaborative editor on the web."

How I Saved Newspapers

Scott Adams – How I Saved Newspapers:

"The key is to get kids interested in the online version of the super-local news. Kids care about themselves more than they care about anything else in the world.

[…] With this concept the local newspaper extends their business model to include working with schools and youth sports teams to make sure there is a steady stream of family-oriented news in addition to world and local stuff. Once you have kids reading newspapers, the potential for advertising is much greater. "

Will Facebook (all but) replace corporate websites?

Martin Kelley at O'Reilly Broadcast – Will Facebook (all but) replace corporate websites?:

"With the rise of the real-time update streams being popularized by Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed, users are becoming accustomed to a constantly-changing flow of pictures, videos and new snippets. Even actively-maintained websites seem locked in languid stupor in comparison.

[…] This will change company's interactions with customers, who will start to expect and then demand real-time interaction. This can take many forms--status updates, calendars, videos--but the emphasis will be on immediacy. The style will shift from slickly-produced mass marketing to a one-on-one responsive back and forth."

Al3x, Meet Ted

Tim Bray – Al3x, Meet Ted:

"At this point I appeal to Sturgeon’s Law, usually stated as “95% of everything is crap”.

The key thing is, you have to do some mental filtering and look at the other 5%. The Internet helps via PageRank and friends, but independent thinking is required too: make your own finding as to who’s worth listening to. It seems a low price to pay for the privilege of being the best-informed generation in history."

Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit--And You Should Too

Bill Taylor – Why Zappos Pays New Employees to Quit--And You Should Too:

"The fast-growing company, which works hard to recruit people to join, says to its newest employees: "If you quit today, we will pay you for the amount of time you've worked, plus we will offer you a $1,000 bonus." Zappos actually bribes its new employees to quit!

Why? Because if you're willing to take the company up on The Offer, you obviously don't have the sense of commitment they are looking for. It's hard to describe the level of energy in the Zappos culture--which means, by definition, it's not for everybody. Zappos wants to learn if there's a bad fit between what makes the organization tick and what makes individual employees tick--and it's willing to pay to learn sooner rather than later."

Cities and Ambition

Paul Graham – Cities and Ambition:

"One of the exhilarating things about coming back to Cambridge every spring is walking through the streets at dusk, when you can see into the houses. When you walk through Palo Alto in the evening, you see nothing but the blue glow of TVs. In Cambridge you see shelves full of promising-looking books.

[…] How many times have you read about startup founders who continued to live inexpensively as their companies took off? Who continued to dress in jeans and t-shirts, to drive the old car they had in grad school, and so on? If you did that in New York, people would treat you like shit. If you walk into a fancy restaurant in San Francisco wearing a jeans and a t-shirt, they're nice to you; who knows who you might be? Not in New York.

One sign of a city's potential as a technology center is the number of restaurants that still require jackets for men. "

Lies We Tell Kids

Paul Graham – Lies We Tell Kids:

"Whenever we lie to kids to protect them, we're usually also lying to keep the peace.

One consequence of this sort of calming lie is that we grow up thinking horrible things are normal. It's hard for us to feel a sense of urgency as adults over something we've literally been trained not to worry about. When I was about 10 I saw a documentary on pollution that put me into a panic. It seemed the planet was being irretrievably ruined. I went to my mother afterward to ask if this was so. I don't remember what she said, but she made me feel better, so I stopped worrying about it.

That was probably the best way to handle a frightened 10 year old. But we should understand the price. This sort of lie is one of the main reasons bad things persist: we're all trained to ignore them."

Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable

Clay Shirky – Newspapers and Thinking the Unthinkable:

"It makes increasingly less sense even to talk about a publishing industry, because the core problem publishing solves — the incredible difficulty, complexity, and expense of making something available to the public — has stopped being a problem.

[…] The competition-deflecting effects of printing cost got destroyed by the internet, where everyone pays for the infrastructure, and then everyone gets to use it. And when Wal-Mart, and the local Maytag dealer, and the law firm hiring a secretary, and that kid down the block selling his bike, were all able to use that infrastructure to get out of their old relationship with the publisher, they did. They’d never really signed up to fund the Baghdad bureau anyway.

[…] For the next few decades, journalism will be made up of overlapping special cases. Many of these models will rely on amateurs as researchers and writers. Many of these models will rely on sponsorship or grants or endowments instead of revenues. Many of these models will rely on excitable 14 year olds distributing the results. Many of these models will fail. No one experiment is going to replace what we are now losing with the demise of news on paper, but over time, the collection of new experiments that do work might give us the journalism we need."

Keine Rente für Wallraff!

Wolfgang Michal – Keine Rente für Wallraff!:

"Arme & Arbeiter kommen in den Medien nur vor, wenn man sie denunzieren kann (Hartz-IV-Schlampen, Kinderverwahrloser, Bildungsdeppen). Für etwas stehen, etwas riskieren, ein Thema durchsetzen, das ist nicht das Ding der jungen Reporter. Sie wollen bloß unterhalten.

Opa Wallraff wird’s schon richten."

The Third System

Extracts from the book The UNIX Philosophy by Mike Gancarz – The Three Systems of Man:

"The third system appears after people become disenchanted with their second system. The Third System is:

• often built by people who have been "burned'' by the second system
• often given a name change to disassociate it with the original obsolete technology
• still contains the original concept intact and is regarded as commonplace
  

The third system combines the best characteristics of the first and second systems. Its developers are given the time to properly develop the system."

Why TV Lost

Paul Graham – Why TV Lost:

"The TV networks already seem, grudgingly, to see where things are going, and have responded by putting their stuff, grudgingly, online. But they're still dragging their heels. They still seem to wish people would watch shows on TV instead, just as newspapers that put their stories online still seem to wish people would wait till the next morning and read them printed on paper. They should both just face the fact that the Internet is the primary medium."

Karmic Koalas Love Eucalyptus

Simon Wardley at O'Reilly Radar – Karmic Koalas Love Eucalyptus:

"Rule 2: I want to easily migrate the service from my infrastructure to a cloud provider and vice versa with a few clicks of a button."

Work in small batches

Eric Ries – Work in small batches:

"It turns out that organizations get better at those things that they do very often. So when we start checking in code more often, release more often, or conduct more frequent design reviews, we can actually do a lot to make those steps dramatically more efficient."

Quality Follows Popularity

Scott Adams – Quality Follows Popularity:

"If you are planning to create some business or other form of entertainment, you will need quality at some point to succeed. But what is more important than quality in the beginning is some intangible element that makes your project inherently interesting before anyone has even sampled it. That initial audience will give you the luxury of time to create quality.

I have a twofold test for whether something can obtain instant popularity and thus have time to achieve quality:

1. You must be able to describe it in a few words.

2. When people hear about it, they ask questions."

Inside Factory China

James Turner interviews Andrew Huang at O'Reilly Radar – Inside Factory China:

"One of the reasons why I like to go out on the floor to China is I like to make sure that all the people that we work with are treated well and humanely, right? So I actually stay in the factory dorms and eat the factory food. So they can't -- I mean there's things that guys can do still in China to sort of fool me. Like they have a special day when they know I'm coming to the floor and they'll give them extra special food or something. That's happened before."

The myth of the concentration oasis

Vaughan at Mind Hacks – The myth of the concentration oasis:

"The past, and for most people on the planet, the present, have never been an oasis of mental calm and creativity. And anyone who thinks they have it hard because people keep emailing them should trying bringing up a room of kids with nothing but two pairs of hands and a cooking pot."

Going rogue inside a big company (a la Best Buy)

Matt Linderman at Signal vs. Noise – Going rogue inside a big company (a la Best Buy):

"Pick something and do it under the radar. Create something in a few weeks that normally takes a few months.

[…] Amazing what a difference a couple of rogue employees can make. If these guys can do it at a company as big as Best Buy, what can you get done at your workplace?"

Can a DAM handle Rights Managed assets?

Henrik de Gyor at Digital Asset Management – Can a DAM handle Rights Managed assets?:

"Can a DAM handle Rights Managed assets? This is far more than an issue of storing Rights Managed assets in a DAM and associating some metadata which state the terms of the asset. 

[…] What if you have multiple licenses for the same asset used different ways? This is getting complex isn’t. A highly DAM customization could do this for your organization."

Oracle Set-up & Management of HP Oracle Database Machine

Robert Stackowiak at O'Reilly Broadcast – Oracle Set-up & Management of HP Oracle Database Machine:

"Much of the advertising for the HP Oracle Database Machine is about performance speedup. In real workload tests, many of Oracle's customers are seeing far more than ten times performance improvement.

[…] Essentially, buyers of the platform need to choose what to name the database and SID, what national character set is used, and whether the database is set up using ARCHIVELOG or NOARCHIVELOG. Other database settings, including common initialization parameters, tablespace layout, and sizes of standard components […] are pre-set based on Oracle best practices."

Keep Your Identity Small

Paul Graham – Keep Your Identity Small:

"Anything else people make can be well or badly designed; why should this be uniquely impossible for programming languages? And indeed, you can have a fruitful discussion about the relative merits of programming languages, so long as you exclude people who respond from identity.

[…] The most intriguing thing about this theory, if it's right, is that it explains not merely which kinds of discussions to avoid, but how to have better ideas. If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible."

For-Profit, Non-Profit, and Scary Humor

Michael Jon Jensen at O'Reilly Radar – For-Profit, Non-Profit, and Scary Humor:

"Because the for-profit sector has few truly long-term interests, on the timescale of the unfolding disaster. ("Human survival is a bonus, but that's twenty years out. What about next quarter's report?")

Further, the scale and scope of the impending collapse will require a special spirit of voluntarism and shared labor and sacrifice, something that's painfully hard to monetize.

[…] My friend and I made a decision, almost two years ago, to use most of our extra evenings to work on the many incarnations of the project, instead of watching reruns of The Daily Show or Lost. The project, especially as it evolved, was much more satisfying than being hypnotized."

The bullshit of outage language

David Heinemeier Hansson at Signal vs. Noise – The bullshit of outage language:

"Also, you should find someone willing to take personal responsibility. Even if it’s not directly their fault. There’s always someone who’s in charge, someone who stops the buck. Hiding behind a faceless “we” is weak."

Steve Jobs' Commencement address (2005)

The June 12, 2005 Commencement address by Steve Jobs at Stanford University:

"For the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: "If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?" And whenever the answer has been "No" for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose."

The Avatar

Scott Adams – The Avatar:

"If you went anywhere this weekend, you probably found yourself in conversations about this pilot and this event. And the thing you probably talked about was his outrageous level of competence. You might have gotten chills when you heard about it. Maybe you teared up. At the very least it impressed the hell out of you. But something more fundamental happened too. This one pilot changed all of us. He reminded us what competence means and he proved in spectacular fashion that it still exists."

Christopher Alexander on the difference between a fifty-year-old carpenter and a novice

Matt Linderman at Signal vs. Noise cites Christopher Alexander – Christopher Alexander on the difference between a fifty-year-old carpenter and a novice:

"The difference between the novice and the master is simply that the novice has not learnt, yet, how to do things in such a way that he can afford to make small mistakes. The master knows that the sequence of his actions will always allow him to cover his mistakes a little further down the line. It is this simple but essential knowledge which gives the work of a master carpenter its wonderful, smooth, relaxed, and almost unconcerned simplicity."

What are Your Force Multipliers in Software Development?

chromatic at O'Reilly Broadcast – What are Your Force Multipliers in Software Development?:

"I can't imagine a world without diff and patch. On the occasion when I need to massage a patch by hand, I recognize how fortunate we are to be able to identify only the differences between systems."

Hard Work and Practice in Programming

Tim O'Reilly at O'Reilly Radar – Hard Work and Practice in Programming:

"There's a long arc in computing that teaches us how much we gain through advances in ease-of-use, with the iPhone being the latest breakthrough success. But it's important to remember how much we lose when we think that ease of use is everything. Many things worth doing are hard, requiring a great deal of practice before you achieve mastery.

[…] The interview with Stroustrup provoked a great discussion on the O'Reilly editors' backchannel. It was so juicy that I wanted to share it with all of you."

"You have to treat your employees like customers"

Matt Linderman at Signal vs. Noise – "You have to treat your employees like customers":

"Over the years, whenever reporters would ask him the secret to Southwest’s success, Mr. Kelleher had a stock response. “You have to treat your employees like customers,” he told Fortune in 2001. “When you treat them right, then they will treat your outside customers right. That has been a powerful competitive weapon for us.”"

The tale of two bridges

Gojko Adzic – The tale of two bridges:

"Understanding why something is required, instead of just blindly following the tasks, is definitely one of the key practices to improve the chances of success in a software project. In my article The magic of goals, I suggested that whenever a client comes with a list of tasks, we should instead ask them for the problems that they are trying to solve and their business goals."

Interview with Clay Shirky

Clay Shirky in a Columbia Journalism Review interview by Russ Juskalian – Interview with Clay Shirky, Part I:

"It seems to me, in fact, from the historical record, that the idea of literary reading as a sort of broad and normal activity was done in by television, and it was done in forty years ago.

The funny thing, though, is when television came along, it became, to a degree literally unprecedented in the history of media—not just the dominant media compared to other media, but really the dominant activity in life outside of sleeping and working—that a curious bargain was struck where television still genuflected to the idea of literary reading. The notion was that there was somehow this sacred cathedral of the great books and so forth. It was just that no one actually participated in it, and so it was sort of this kind of Potemkin village. What the Internet has actually done is not decimate literary reading; that was really a done deal by 1970. What it has done, instead, is brought back reading and writing as a normal activity for a huge group of people."

Search Vendors Directory

Search Components Online – Search Vendors Directory:

"So who are the main players in Enterprise Search?"

Mobile Gold

Tim Bray – Mobile Gold:

"We are, right now in early 2009, sliding into the golden age of mobile technology and business.

[…] What’s crucial is that there will be at least four players—all with healthy finances and real engineering depth—vying to build devices to improve your life. Which is wonderful! This kind of competition on a wide-open playing field is what makes evolution and growth happen.

[…] The iPhone has proved that a mobile device can really truly be a first-class citizen of the Net. Which had been true in theory for a decade; but only in theory. Speaking personally, as a person who’d never thought I needed the Internet in my pocket, I find myself using my G1 to approve comments and check the weather and fetch maps and so on all the time."

iPhoto '09 and Domain Language

Ryan Singer at Signal vs. Noise – iPhoto '09 and Domain Language:

"There is a strong tendency to use the same words that you see other software using. Be cautious about copying domain language, because copying language is copying a whole approach. Think through the domain yourself. What are people trying to do? What do they care about? Find your own language to cut closer to the bone and touch your customers’ real interests. Your software will be all the better for it."

Future of your Phone

Scott Adams – Future of your Phone:

"Imagine wondering how long the line is to an event, or what a particular forest fire looks like, for example.  You send a query through your iPhone for anyone who is in that area, according to GPS tracking, and ask for a look. A kind stranger takes your query, sets his phone to stream video, and gives you the view from his perspective. You would have eyes anywhere there are people. "

Hardware is Cheap, Programmers are Expensive

Jeff Atwood – Hardware is Cheap, Programmers are Expensive:

"Incidentally, this is also why failing to outfit your (relatively) highly paid programmers with decent equipment as per the Programmer's Bill of Rights is such a colossal mistake. If a one-time investment of $4,000 on each programmer makes them merely 5% more productive, you'll break even after the first year.

[…] Always try to spend your way out of a performance problem first by throwing faster hardware at it. It'll often be a quicker and cheaper way to resolve immediate performance issues than attempting to code your way out of it. Longer term, of course, you'll do both."

The new Fog Creek office

Joel Spolsky – The new Fog Creek office:

"Private offices with doors that close prevent programmers from interruptions allowing them to concentrate on code without being forced to stop and listen to every interesting conversation in the room.

[…] Long, straight desks include a motorized height-adjustable work surface for maximal ergonomics and comfort, and so you can stand up for part of the day if you want. Standard 30” monitors. Desks are straight instead of L-shaped to make pair programming and code reviews more comfortable. There are 20 electrical outlets behind every desk and most developers have small hubs for extra computers. Our standard-issue chair is the Herman Miller Aeron."

AD VII: Nine Programmer’s Notes

Tim Bray – AD VII: Nine Programmer’s Notes:

"At a deep level, debugging with print statements is superior to all other approaches. Which is good, because we seem to be stuck with it."

Another resume tip

Joel Spolsky – Another resume tip:

"To a startup founder, middle managers just seem like added expense without more code getting written, and the only thing we REALLY need is

• code to be written, and
• customers to be called on the telephone."
  

LDIF Basics

LDAP know-how at Novell Cool Solutions, from 2004 – LDIF Basics:

"Change Records contain a set of commands for a particular entry (such as add, delete, or modify). They are used when you want to modify entries within your directory."

The Price of Information Has Fallen and It Can't Get Up

Clay Shirky back in 1997 –The Price of Information Has Fallen and It Can't Get Up:

"Once a product has entered the world of the freebies used to sell boxes of cereal, it will never become a direct source of user fees again.

[…] You might drive three miles to buy used baby clothes, thirty for a used car and sixty for rare coins. Thus, in the economically ideal classified ad scheme, all sellers would use one single classified database nationwide, and then buyers would simply limit their searches by area. This would maximize the choice available to the buyers and the cost able to be commanded by the sellers. It would also destroy a huge source of newspapers revenue."

Quality comes from cooperation

Gojko Adzic – Quality comes from cooperation:

"Quality means different things to different people, Ambler [Chris Ambler, European test manager for Microsoft games] concluded [at XPDay 2008 in London]. He defined his meaning of it as:

• Progression: people can get through the software from the beginning to the end
• Stability: people should not have unexpected problems with the software
• Experience: emotion that people get out of it"
  

The Nonfussy Pill

Scott Adams – The Nonfussy Pill:

"The new poverty is likely to be different from anything that came before. Imagine a world where even the poor have good Internet access and universal healthcare. If you were healthy and could use the Internet to find everything else you needed, from borrowing a tool to organizing a Scrabble game, you'd be pretty much set."

Unicode

Sean McGrath at ITworld – Unicode:

"Let us start by looking at four main variables in the space : language, country, culture and technology. Language. Let us take that one first. How hard can that be?

[…] Oh dear, when we hit the Middle East we hit languages that drive the wrong way on the page. Right to left! That changes essentially everything user-interface-related in most software. Further east we hit ideographics. The concept of a "letter" has just flew out of the occidental window. Not only that but the text is laid out top to bottom. What to do?"

(Via Sam Ruby.)

Google Is My Doctor

Scott Adams – Google Is My Doctor:

"Long story short, the operation I read about wasn't as promising as the article suggested, but the final surgeon in my travels had his own version of surgery that had a good track record. I tried it, and now my voice is normal. I never would have found that path without Google Alerts."

Eine Art LDAP für Metadaten?

Niels Hufnagl im SNAPlog – Eine Art LDAP für Metadaten?:

"Ein halbes Jahr später. Gegen den Artikel wurde juristisch vorgegangen und dummerweise auch noch zu recht. Das kann vorkommen. Wer weiß jetzt noch, an welche Systeme er denken muß, wenn er den Artikel unternehmensweit sperren möchte?

[…] Mir kam bei der Diskussion so der Gedanke, daß das Problem eigentlich sehr ähnlich dem der Benutzerrechte vor Einführung von LDAP sein könnte. Es fehlt eine zentrale Unternehmensdatenbank, in der solche Informationen, die über Systemgrenzen hinweg wichtig sind, gespeichert werden können. In der jede Anwendung Informationen darüber findet, ob Artikel juristisch unbedenklich sind, welche Rechte an Bildern das Unternehmen eigentlich hat, wann diese Rechte auslaufen und so weiter."

The RIA and the Polyglot VM

chromatic at O'Reilly Broadcast – The RIA and the Polyglot VM:

"Of course, the obvious problem with this approach [of Silverlight, JavaFX, and Adobe AIR] is that a big blob of proprietary goo is only a solution for people who want to (or have permission to) get that goo all over their machines. Remember how boggled your bank was back in 2004/2005 that you weren't using Microsoft IE (or that no version of IE had ever run on your OS)? Imagine explaining to them that your 64-bit PC-BSD machine will never get a native version of AIR, and you'd really like to write a check.

At least with bog-standard HTML and CSS (and sometimes, Ajax), the horrifyingly ugly interface works.

The technical design is right, however. A powerful virtual machine, capable of hosting interoperable languages and expressing useful and distinct dialects could improve the state of network-savvy, ubiquitious applications. Don't expect it to come from a proprietary blob, however -- and don't expect JavaScript to be the answer."

Oops, we did it again

Monty Widenius – Oops, we did it again (MySQL 5.1 released as GA with crashing bugs):

"We have changed the release model so that instead of focusing on quality and features our release is now defined by timeliness and features. Quality is not regarded to be that important."

unoconv

"unoconv converts between any document format that OpenOffice understands. It uses OpenOffice's UNO bindings for non-interactive conversion of documents.

• Converts between different document formats that OpenOffice understands
• OpenOffice can export to about 100 different document formats
• Can be used for batch processing
• […] Can be used in a client/server environment to process documents centrally"
  

My Style of Servant Leadership

Joel Spolsky at Inc.com – How Hard Could It Be?: My Style of Servant Leadership:

"Our company was built on the idea of hiring smart and productive people and then clearing the decks. The late, great minicomputer company Digital Equipment Corporation, better known as DEC, was so adamant about this idea that people in the company used the word administration in place of management and modeled its corporate hierarchy on that of a great research university."

The Other Half of "Artists Ship"

Paul Graham – The Other Half of "Artists Ship":

"Programmers are unlike many types of workers in that the best ones actually prefer to work hard. This doesn't seem to be the case in most types of work.

[…] If you have an idea for a new feature in the morning, you can write it and push it to the production servers before lunch. And when you can do that, you have more ideas.

[…] And just as the greatest danger of being hard to sell to is not that you overpay but that the best suppliers won't even sell to you, the greatest danger of applying too many checks to your programmers is not that you'll make them unproductive, but that good programmers won't even want to work for you.

Steve Jobs's famous maxim "artists ship" works both ways. Artists aren't merely capable of shipping. They insist on it. So if you don't let people ship, you won't have any artists."

Hire managers of one

Signal vs. Noise – Hire managers of one:

"A manager of one is someone who comes up with their own goals and executes them. They don’t need heavy direction. They don’t need daily check-ins. They do what a manager would do — set the tone, assign items, determine what needs to get done, etc. — but they do it by themselves and for themselves."

GeoNames

Dreiste Abzocke oder gar Betrug? OpenOffice-Download nie bei openDownload.de

Disconnecting Distraction

Paul Graham – Disconnecting Distraction:

"After years of carefully avoiding classic time sinks like TV, games, and Usenet, I still managed to fall prey to distraction, because I didn't realize that it evolves. Something that used to be safe, using the Internet, gradually became more and more dangerous. Some days I'd wake up, get a cup of tea and check the news, then check email, then check the news again, then answer a few emails, then suddenly notice it was almost lunchtime and I hadn't gotten any real work done. And this started to happen more and more often."

Why geeks don't like to run AV

John Viega – Why geeks don't like to run AV:

"Even though I owned development for McAfee's anti-virus technology, I did not run it at all the entire time I was there, even out of company loyalty. I did run a process NAMED the same as our AV that just fork()ed and slept, so that their VPN client would let me on their network."

LIFE photo archive hosted by Google

Private/Public Cloud

Nati Shalom – Private/Public Cloud:

"It is clear that to make IT operations more effective, it doesn't make sense to run all the applications that are currently hosted in a company's data center in the private cloud.

[…] Disaster recovery sites require us to double our resources, let alone the cost associated with maintaining two separate data centers. These are classic scenarios in which running applications on a public cloud could lead to huge cost savings."

(Via High Scalability.)

Daddy, Where's Your Phone?

Tim O'Reilly at O'Reilly Radar – Daddy, Where's Your Phone?:

"What do you mean, where's my phone?" She explained that she'd overheard the question. Why wasn't he just looking up the answer on his phone?

Out of the mouths of babes. Vic said that he realized in that moment that the era of the PC was over, and that the future belonged to cloud applications accessed via phones."

How do You Avoid The Muse? Let's make a list…

The Fat Man – How do You Avoid The Muse? Let's make a list…:

"Pretty much everybody out with whom I hung would have emphatically jumped through unthinkable flaming hoops to have access to a 24-track recording device and a microphone or two--it would have been like...living in the Realm of the Gods.

[…] Now that we (everybody who reads this on O'Reilly anyway) have more than enough equipment to make the music, art, videos, etc. The golden gates to creativity are open. But to gaze beyond them is all the more terrifying for that openness. One of my friends, Charlie, remarked, "The suits can't stand to be in a room with a piano. It scares the shit out of them, because it represents Infinite Possibility.""

The depths of OS X: SIPS

Jon Simpson – The depths of OS X: SIPS:

"That solution is sips. The “scriptable image processing system” by self-description and a tool built right into Mac OS X, using all of the format support and output support available to the OS.

sips -s format jpeg test.png --out test.jpg"

Here's the Apple man page for sips.

Congrats to Tika and Welcome to the Lucene Stack!

Grant Ingersoll – Congrats to Tika and Welcome to the Lucene Stack!:

"Tika is a content extraction framework that wraps many other content extraction libraries such as PDFBox, POI, and others into a single, easy to use framework that makes it easy to add extracted content to Lucene, Solr and any other text application."

One Internet, One File

 Matthew Gonnering, Widen – One Internet, One File:

"Since there is really only one internet, Widen has allowed organizations to use one file (located in the Widen DAM system) across all internet locations.  Instead of enabling users to download files, users of Widen digital asset management technology copy a pointer to that file instead.  That pointer is just a bunch of text."

Business Software Needs a Revolution

Jim Kerstetter in a BusinessWeek commentary – Business Software Needs a Revolution:

"Last year, the National Institute of Standards & Technology estimated that the annual cost of difficult-to-use or flat-out buggy software on the U.S. economy was $59.5 billion. Analysts estimate business-software customers spend $5 installing and fixing their software for every $1 they spend on software.

[…] There's a troubling analogy to be made here to the fall of the American auto industry in the 1970s. As early as the 1950s, quality assurance experts like W. Edwards Deming were trying to win converts to rigid quality standards. Few in Detroit listened. But quality management was embraced in Japan, which helped to make the Japanese auto industry a powerhouse. Today, software quality gurus have been largely ignored in Silicon Valley. But in the new tech center of Bangalore, India, quality experts have been welcomed.

[…] Software should be delivered as a service over the Internet instead of shipped to customers on a disk. If the people who designed the software are the ones actually running it, wouldn't they have an easier time fixing it when something goes wrong?"

Where have all the filters gone?

Mark Bennett at New Idea Engineering – Where have all the filters gone?:

"Through various mergers and acquisitions, the three main vendors for commercial document filters are now owned by companies who are already selling their own search products.

[…] The 3 top commercial filters being used now are:

1. Stellent [Outside In Technology] – Now part of Oracle, who now sells "search"
2. KeyView – Now part of Autonomy, a Tier-1 search vendor
3. Microsoft IFilter Framework (part of some Microsoft products) – Microsoft is also pushing their own search technology."

PDFBox

"PDFBox is an open source Java PDF library for working with PDF documents. This project allows creation of new PDF documents, manipulation of existing documents and the ability to extract content from documents. PDFBox also includes several command line utilities."

It's being used by Alfresco.

Sun Presenter Console extension is useful but undocumented

 Bruce Byfield at Linux.com – Sun Presenter Console extension is useful but undocumented:

"After installation, you will not see any sign of SPC except in the Extension Manager. To use it, open your slide show in OOo Impress and go to Slide Show -> Slide Show Settings in the menu. Under Presentation monitor, select the display on which the audience will view the presentation. Once this setting is configured, SPC will start automatically on the other display, making it visible to you, but not to your audience."

Ad blocking with ad server hostnames and IP addresses

Peter Lowe provides a great list of ad servers for blocking ads:

"So, to start blocking ads:

• find your hosts file

• download the list of ad servers

• copy the list of ad servers on the end of your hosts file (see Where's my hosts file? if you don't know where it is)

• restart your browser"

XRX and Context Delivery Architecture

Dan McCreary – XRX and Context Delivery Architecture:

"When we create a form dynamically through auto-generation we usually know the id of person who is filling out the form and we can use an XQuery look-up service to see what roles that person has, and what departments, projects and groups they are in. We can also use context such a what day of the week is, what prior actions of the users have taken, what their preferences are, or their purchase history to determine the behavior of the form. These factors generate what is called the "Context" of the interaction and in the past it was one form for all contexts. With XRX you have a lot more control about using context to customized the form."

What's new with Apache Solr

 Grant Ingersoll at IBM developerWorks – What's new with Apache Solr:

"With the 1.3 release, Solr adds in distributed search capabilities. The application splits up the documents across several machines, commonly referred to as shards by Solr (and others). Each shard contains its own self-contained index, and Solr can coordinate the querying of the indexes across the shards. Unfortunately, at this time, applications must still handle the process of sending the documents to individual shards for indexing, but this will likely be added in a future Solr release.

Rolling Your Own Newsroom

Robert Passarella at O'Reilly Radar – Rolling Your Own Newsroom:

"What I like about Google's Reader is the ability to tag items and then turn those tags into feeds for friends or inputs to other applications, like Yahoo Pipes. As I started playing with tags and feeds, I realized that you could create a real useful and simple version of a personal Newsroom. […] As I read throughout the day, I hand tag all the items that I think are interesting. The feeds automatically update through my tagging and with a small bit of delay they appear on the page.

The key is that all of the items that make it to the page have been reviewed and selected by me. So I am cultivating these stories and sources for my audience instead of having automated keyword tagging populate a feed.

[…] If you are a small organization or group, this is an ideal way to keep track of topics."

Bluff

Free Software Now

Tim Bray – Free Software Now:

"When business is already hurting, up-front software license fees hurt especially hard, and I just don’t believe that Enterprise Software, as currently priced, has much future, in the near term anyhow.

[…] The drum that Jonathan has been pounding on ever since I got here about “Monetization at the point of value” is just getting louder and louder and it’s not going away.

Technology adoption has to be free. Technology deployment has to be real cheap. When you scale a system up and you’re getting business value for it, that’s when you can actually write a proposal for infrastructure and support that won’t get turfed by the nearest corporate-finance person."

A Good Time for Agility

Tim Bray – A Good Time for Agility:

"But just because times are tough doesn’t mean we’re going to stop developing projects. It just means we have to be agile about it."

Metadata Working Group – Guidelines for Handling Image Metadata

The Metadata Working Group – Specifications:

"The content overlap between the most commonly used standards can result in some confusion. This document describes how best to use existing standards such as Exif, IPTC, and XMP to address the key organizational metadata questions that most consumers have."

An excerpt from the Guidelines for Handling Image Metadata [PDF]:

"A Changer application first reads metadata from the image file and then writes new or modified metadata back to the same file. 

The rules for an application in Changer role are:

•  It MUST NOT delete metadata unintentionally.

•  It SHOULD obey rules for Consumer applications when reading metadata.

•  It SHOULD keep all forms of metadata it modifies in sync with each other.

The first rule implies that if the image file contains metadata fields that the application does not understand, it must preserve them when writing new or updated fields back to the file. The second rule
comes from the fact that, almost always, the Changer application is also a Consumer application so it must also observe all Consumer application rules. The third rule states, that whenever, the Changer
application writes new metadata fields to the file, it must keep different forms exiting in the file, e.g. Exif, IPTC-IIM and XMP, in sync. This could also mean to remove a particular metadata
representation while writing another preferred one."

Uh, Oh - It's Magic

Mark Logic CEO Dave Kellogg (back in 2005) – Uh, Oh - It's Magic:

"I’ll tell you one thing that I think is wrong with search: magic. If there’s one lesson I learned in 20+ years in the data world, it’s that magic doesn’t sell. Customers don’t like magic.

[…] I chuckle when I see search vendors chest-thumping about Bayesian this-or-that in their marketing. I majored in math at Berkeley and barely understand Bayesian inferencing. Will your average customer do any better? When vendors think they’re impressing customers with their algorithms, they’re just scaring them."

Password management finally possible

Joel Spolsky – Password management finally possible:

"On all your Windows computers, install PasswordSafe. […] Store the file in your DropBox folder."

On the Mac, you can use either Password Gorilla or PasswordSafeSWT.

JavaScript frameworks for large web applications?

 What to choose for an Ajax-based web application (full JavaScript "RIA" interface)? We're especially looking for lots of stable, beautiful, existing components (tree view with drag & drop, floating grid, forms), and an architecture suited to writing a large application… Contenders:

• YUI (Yahoo! UI Library)
  
• Ext JS
• Dojo / Dijit
• SproutCore
• GWT (Google Web Toolkit)
• qooxdoo
  

Having fun with geotagged photos

Design Float – Having fun with geotagged photos:

"Today I am going to explain how to extract the geotagging information stored by Picasa and do some fun things with it in PHP."

iPod touch Backward Lesson from Windows Mobile: The Value of a Phone-less Device

Todd Ogasawara at the O'Reilly Digital Media Blog – iPod touch Backward Lesson from Windows Mobile: The Value of a Phone-less Device:

"The iPod touch with its new ability to download and install applications will, I believe, demonstrate that there is a segment of the market that wants a multimedia-PDA device that is connectable (via WiFi) but not always connected."

Build One To Throw Away

Tim Bray –Build One To Throw Away:

"Managers, good managers, want a plan; they want to lock in design constraints so that work can be dealt out and progress tracked and promises kept. Programmers, good programmers, know that they’re not smart enough to get the core design choices right until they’ve built something that works.

The various techniques and disciplines gathered around the banner of “agile” are on balance more honest at facing up to this unavoidable tension. But there’s still lots more work to be done.

And the most important thing is, we all have to remind ourselves, all the time, that we’re not smart enough to get anything important right the first time."

Latency is Everywhere and it Costs You Sales - How to Crush it

Todd Hoff at High Scalability – Latency is Everywhere and it Costs You Sales - How to Crush it:

"In one of Greg's slides Google VP Marissa Mayer, in reference to the Google results, is quoted as saying "Users really respond to speed." […] Yet for some reason latency isn't a topic talked a lot about for web apps. We talk a lot about about building high-capacity sites, but very little about how to build low-latency sites."

Easier file uploads: DragDropUpload, iFrames

Firefox extension DragDropUpload (found here in the Firefox add-on directory): "Drop files into attachment boxes instead of browse for them or type in the filename. Drop multiple files and fill all the entries."

iFrame-based file uploads are described here: WebToolkit: AJAX file upload, El Micox Codes: Asynchronous upload - Like AJAX - 1 function.

Drop.io

The fifth element of the Agile Manifesto

Gojko Adzic – The fifth element of the Agile Manifesto:

"Martin [Fowler] then talked about Ignaz Semmelweis, a hospital administrator in 19th century Vienna who discovered that the mortality rate in a maternity clinic could be drastically cut by making doctors wash their hands when moving between the autopsy ward and the maternity ward. Semmelweis met with stiff resistance, including the claim that doctors had no time to wash their hands, according to the talk. 

[…] Drawing parallels between that story and software development, Martin asked programmers to “wash their hands” and write clean code, not giving in to time pressures or claiming that they have no time for that or that they will not be allowed to do that."

10 ways to screw up despite Scrum and XP

Gojko  Adzic – 10 ways to screw up despite Scrum and XP:

"Henrik Kniberg, author of Scrum and Xp from the Trenches, talked today at Agile 2008 about the most common ways for teams to fail despite applying agile practices and tools. His presentation was organised as a talk about common problems and symptoms of those problems, with audience voting on what hurts them the most."

A Bunch of Great Strategies for Using Memcached and MySQL Better Together

Todd Hoff at High Scalability – A Bunch of Great Strategies for Using Memcached and MySQL Better Together:

"What I'm struck with is the enormous amount of effort that goes into syncing rows and objects back and forth between the cache and the database. Shouldn't it be easier?"

Building smart teams

Gojko Adzic – Building smart teams:

"Have people on the team that think differently, use different tools and approach the problems from a different angle. This will help the team spot blind spots easier and avoid the echo effect, increasing the team collective intelligence."

Average environments beget average work

David Heinemeier Hansson at Signal vs. Noise – Average environments beget average work:

"In my experience, we’re all capable of bad, average, and good work. I’ve certainly done bad work at times and plenty of average work. What I’ve realized is that the good and the exceptional work is at least as much about my environment as it is about me. Average environments begets average work."

HTTP Status: Redirection

Ben Ramsey – HTTP Status: Redirection:

"If you want to process a POST request and then safely redirect the user agent using GET, use 303 See Other."

CSS Considered Unstylish - or why CSS sucks

Jon Meyer – CSS Considered Unstylish - or why CSS sucks:

"CSS purports to separate style and content, but in fact it radically fails to do so. Rather, the opposite is true - CSS actually conflates style and structure. CSS stylesheets impose many implicit restrictions on the HTML structure. These restrictions are poorly defined and underspecified.

[…] Rules have a tendency to get tangled together, and its hard to pull them apart. Often, its faster to start from scratch than to modify an existing stylesheet.

[…] To conclude, I believe CSS is too complex, has no good WYSIWIG experience, and misses basic features found in other styling systems.

CSS would be stronger if it only offered named styles, based-on styles, no cascade, and support for modules/namespacing. "

Choosing the right things to say no to

Matt Linderman at Signal vs. Noise cites Danny Meyer:

“I’ve made much more money by choosing the right things to say no to than by choosing things to say yes to. I measure it by the money I haven’t lost and the quality I haven’t sacrificed.”

Munin

Using Munin you can easily monitor the performance of your computers, networks, SANs, applications, weather measurements and whatever comes to mind. It makes it easy to determine "what's different today" when a performance problem crops up. It makes it easy to see how you're doing capacity-wise on any resources."

Git smart: How we're using Git to track our source code

Signal vs. Noise – Git smart: How we're using Git to track our source code:

"Branching and merging in Subversion are painful. If you’ve never used it, you don’t know what I mean. If you have, you do. Branching and merging in git, though, are wonderfully, blissfully straightforward. For those two reasons alone git is worth the switch for us, though there are lots of other, more advanced, features we like about git, too (git-stash, git-bisect, etc.)"

Is Google Making Us Stupid?

Nicholas Carr in The Atlantic Monthly – Is Google Making Us Stupid?:

"As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the Net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the Net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

I’m not the only one. When I mention my troubles with reading to friends and acquaintances—literary types, most of them—many say they’re having similar experiences. The more they use the Web, the more they have to fight to stay focused on long pieces of writing."

(Via Jon Udell.) 

Delivering useful software

Gojko Adzic – Delivering useful software:

"If an iteration produces software that can really be used every day, then ship it and make the clients use it. It is definitely useful to get feedback early, but having something go live, even if it causes rework or throwing away parts of software later, is much much more valuable than software that is only tested. It has more value for the customer, since they are getting a part of their problem solved earlier. It also has more value for the development of the whole project, since it brings real, authoritative feedback from everyday use."

Standing versus Sitting

Jamis Buck at Signal vs. Noise – Standing versus Sitting:

"So I propped my keyboard and mouse up on a few encyclopedias and gave it a go. The first week was rough on my feet and legs, which ached constantly. I kept a bar stool handy for resting periodically on, but I really tried to stand at least 80% of the time. After that first week, though, things improved rapidly.

Hire family people

David Heinemeier Hansson at Signal vs. Noise – Hire family people:

"When people have other obligations outside of work that they actually care more about than your probably-not-so-world-changing idea, the crutches are not available as an easy way out, and you’ll have to walk by the power of your good ideas and execution or you’ll fall fast and early. That’s a good thing!

[…] This is what companies need, startups or not. They need constraints and especially constraints on how often you can play the hero card to Get This Very Important Project Done. Most projects are just not that important and most things just shouldn’t be done anyway, despite how good of an idea you feel it is in the heat of the moment." 

Be Good

Paul Graham - Be Good:

"There are many advantages of launching quickly, but the most important may be that once you have users, the tamagotchi effect kicks in. Once you have users to take care of, you're forced to figure out what will make them happy, and that's actually very valuable information." 

The waterfall trap for “agile” projects

Gojko Adzic – The waterfall trap for “agile” projects:

"Because increments are done in detail, a lot of effort is wasted when a piece needs rework (and the initial releases are almost certain to fall into this category). Iterative development offers a chance to see the picture from the start, and guide the development towards the full picture in steps. Not carving stuff in stone from the start allows us to change them easier later on, and we know that we’ll need to do that. Jeff gave the following rule of thumb to check quickly if your plan is iterative or incremental: “it’s not iterating if you do it only once”."

Agile / Lean or Common Sense and Permission To Change?

Rob Bieber - Agile / Lean or Common Sense and Permission To Change?:

"What Semler’s story shows me is that if people are given the freedom to work the way that is most effective, they will. More than that, if you invest in them with trust, they will want to do these things as their commitment to the company will obviously go up based on how they feel they are treated.

Semler uses a key phrase throughout his books that is repeated over and over. “Treat people like adults”. Semco, Toyota, Amazon and Google seem to do a really good job at this, as I’m sure most high functioning companies do."

Excerpts from Ricardo Semler's book "Maverick: The Success Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace"

Matt Linderman at Signal vs. Noise – Excerpts from Ricardo Semler's book "Maverick: The Success Behind the World's Most Unusual Workplace" (citing Ricardo Semler's Maverick):

"In other words, the successful companies will be the ones that put quality of life first. Do this and the rest – quality of product, productivity of workers, profits for all – will follow. At Semco we did away with strictures that dictate the “hows” and created fertile soil for differences. We gave people an opportunity to test, question, and disagree. We let them determine their own futures. We let them come and go as they wanted, work at home if they wished, set their own salaries, choose their own bosses. We let them change their minds and ours, prove us wrong when we are wrong, make us humbler."

See also his follow-up post Tips on how to work smarter from Ricardo Semler. 

Yours, Mine and Ours

Eric Sink – Yours, Mine and Ours:

"In terms of the size of the canyon, ThemWare is probably the worst possible scenario. If I am building software that I don't use and don't know how to use for people I don't understand or even like, how good is my software going to be?

I probably see every feature in terms of how difficult it will be to implement, rather than how valuable it will be for my users.

I probably find myself wanting to label or document the features using my jargon instead of theirs.

I probably create features that are tedious or unintuitive for my users. I can't imagine why the user interface I designed doesn't make sense to them.

ThemWare is hard."

Faster than expected... (Salesforce, Google + EC2 with Disks)

Timothy M. O'Brien at the O'Reilly ONJava Blog – Faster than expected... (Salesforce, Google + EC2 with Disks):

"When you can fire up Eclipse and deploy a custom application to Salesforce to have it show up for your users in the context of Google Apps (Gmail, GTalk, Google Calendar, Google Docs), your own in-house applications may start to look a little pale. Five minutes later when the damn thing shows up on your boss’ iPhone and the CEO’s blackberry, you are going to sound crazy when you tell them that it is going to take your development team a few more months to integrate your legacy applications with mobile devices. They are both going to look at you and say, “well can’t you just get the data into Google Apps?”"

Fire and Motion

Joel Spolsky at Inc.com – Fire and Motion:

"If your competitors are really solving a problem in a unique way, you won't miss out by focusing on your own customers. Rest assured that your customers are already trying to tell you that this opportunity exists, if you'll only listen. A minute spent understanding the competition is a minute not spent listening to customers, potential customers, and near-miss customers, who would be happy to tell you directly what it would take to sell to them. You might even come up with a solution on your own that's better than the one your competitor came up with. That's when you start creating your own fire and motion -- when you innovate."

Inspecting disk IO performance with fio

Ben Martin at Linux.com – Inspecting disk IO performance with fio:

"The vast array of ways that fio can issue its IO requests lends it to benchmarking IO patterns and the use of various APIs to perform that IO. You can also run identical fio configurations on different filesystems or underlying hardware to see what difference changes at that level will make to performance."

Supervisor

"Supervisor provides you with one place to start, stop, and monitor your processes. Processes can be controlled individually or in groups. You can configure Supervisor to provide a local or remote command line and web interface."

 (Via High Scalability.)

The Worthlessness of Code

James Turner at O'Reilly ONLamp - The Worthlessness of Code:

"When management talks about the value of code, they’re really talking about the value of the experience that the engineers gained by developing the code, as expressed in the code.

The problem is, most companies let the value walk out the door (either through layoffs or attrition), leaving them with “value” that the new engineers don’t understand, because the value is really the synergy of the code and the engineers who wrote it.

[…] We should treat code like a depreciated asset; the longer it sticks around, the less valuable it becomes. Eventually, it actually takes on negative value, because the potential security risks and support nightmares of bit rotted code can be huge. Embrace the freedom that acknowledging these facts bring, budget a periodic total rewrite into your business plans, and you’ll never end up with a piece of code that nobody has any idea what it does."

You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss

Paul Graham - You Weren't Meant to Have a Boss:

"A group of 10 people within a large organization is a kind of fake tribe. The number of people you interact with is about right. But something is missing: individual initiative. Tribes of hunter-gatherers have more freedom. The leaders have a little more power than other members of the tribe, but they don't generally tell them what to do and when the way a boss can.

It's not your boss's fault. The real problem is that in the group above you in the hierarchy, your entire group is one virtual person. Your boss is just the way that constraint is imparted to you."

Disks have become tapes

Tom White - "Disks have become tapes":

"In essence MapReduce works by repeatedly sorting and merging data that is streamed to and from disk at the transfer rate of the disk. Contrast this to accessing data from a relational database that operates at the seek rate of the disk."

(Via Nat Torkington at O'Reilly Radar.) 

The Adoption-Led Market

Simon Phipps - The Adoption-Led Market:

"Traditionally, the process of acquiring software has involved a request for proposal from vendors against a customer specification. Vendors then make proposals, submit prototypes, contend for business. In smaller bids, an evaluation team considers trial versions, makes evaluations, makes proposals to management. Eventually software is selected and paid for. At that point, adoption can begin. Every user of software in this model is also a customer. Software selection is something of a matter of faith in the procurement-driven market.

The switch to a mesh topology for society1 has led to easy access for everyone to Free software created by open source communities. The result is an emerging approach which is rapidly spreading for smaller software projects and in my view is the future of all software acquisition. The emerging approach is an adoption-led market.

In this approach, developers select from available Free software and try the software that fits best in their proposed application."

(Via Tim Bray.) 

Bigger isn't always better for business

Charles Handy at Marketplace - Bigger isn't always better for business:

"If I were to visit a symphony orchestra and ask them about their growth plans for the future, how would they respond? They would talk about their plans to extend their repertoire and to bring their work to new audiences, not about increasing the number of violinists. The same holds true for a school or a hospital. Once they get to the appropriate size, they strive to be better not bigger.

Why should it be different for business? Why does almost every business that I know seek to grow in size, year after year, in fact, as if there were no limit?"

(Via Signal vs. Noise) 

I will Get That Nobel Peace Prize Yet!

Scott Adams at The Dilbert Blog - I will Get That Nobel Peace Prize Yet!:

"The $100 laptops we keep hearing about will eventually give Internet access to even small villages. Imagine having a pen pal in some tiny African village. You learn that all they need is one of those foot-operated water pumps for irrigating fields and a bag of seeds and they can build a decent life. For a few hundred dollars you could save an entire village and get to see the results in real time. Who could resist?"

Convert Documents From doc/ppt/xls/etc to html/pdf/flash/etc Using OpenOffice.org

Parand Tony Darugar - Convert Documents From doc/ppt/xls/etc to html/pdf/flash/etc Using OpenOffice.org:

"The magic solution is simply to use JODConverter with OpenOffice. In particular, I downloaded OpenOffice 2.3.1 for OS X, started it as “headless”:

/Applications/OpenOffice.org\ 2.3.app/Contents/MacOS/soffice -headless -accept="socket,host=127.0.0.1,port=8100;urp;" -nofirststartwizard &

and then used JODConverter commandline to convert files:

alias ooconv='java -jar /Users/parand/Packages/jodconverter-2.2.1/lib/jodconverter-cli-2.2.1.jar'

ooconv SomePowerpointFile.ppt -f swf "

Reuters CEO sees "semantic web" in its future

Tim O'Reilly at O'Reilly radar - Reuters CEO sees "semantic web" in its future:

"What I think does ultimately matter is the ability of professional media to build specialized interfaces and vertical data stores that are suited to their niche, hopefully harnessing data and services from the consumer internet, and mashing them up with specialized, perhaps private, data stores. Put that together with metadata for programmable re-use, and you may really have something."

Embracing My Inner Geek: Part 2 - The Job

Jon Wise - Embracing My Inner Geek: Part 2 - The Job:

"So after months of wearing jeans, chugging caffeine, cluttering your desk with sketches and reference material, you clean yourself up, put on a nice pair of pants, comb your hair, and sell again. Although most organizations have a sales force and a marketing department, a savvy customer will invariably want technical details that a non-coder can’t supply. As a lead developer on a project, it falls to you to instill confidence, to speak articulately and passionately about the appropriateness and worth of your solution.
Again, as before, pride is a weakness here, because no matter how good you are, someone will always ask if your software can do something it can’t — user’s are never really satisfied. So you think back to the design process, you remind them when they had a part in the decisions, and you attempt to impress upon them respect for the solution you have now, while acknowledging that there will always be a version 2.0."

Switch: One year later

One year after the Switch, I'm still quite happy with my MacBook Pro (now running Leopard). Although it took me a couple of weeks to get accustomed to the differences in keyboard layout (@, Cmd vs. Ctrl, brackets etc.)...

Pros:

• very beautiful, thoughtfully designed (and fast) hardware and software, great user experience
  
• changing networks and plugging/unplugging external displays just works (some of these things required reboots on my Windows laptop)
  
• Unix command line, Mac GUI, Windows VMs - definitely the best of all three worlds
• Spotlight, Finder, Quick Look and the ubiquitous PDF support are a huge advantage over Windows
• I like TextWrangler and iTerm better than similar free software that's available for Windows
• high fun factor; kids love Photo Booth

Cons:

• not crash-free; it's freezed and crashed as often as my Windows XP laptop (although most of the problems seemed to be caused by the third-party ISDN adapter driver)
• it loses the Bluetooth Mighty Mouse every two or three days, I have to search for it via System Preferences (how would you do that on an iMac when your only mouse is not working?)
• the screen cannot be opened wide enough for an optimal viewing angle (my old Acer laptop screen could be opened 180 degrees)
• no free VMware Player and no VMware Console for the Mac (but Fusion is cheaper than Workstation)
  

Here's the software I'm actually using: 

• Apple Address Book, Automator, Dictionary, Front Row, GarageBand, iCal, iChat, iPhoto, iTunes, Photo Booth, Safari, Time Machine
• Adium
• Google Earth
• iTerm
• Jing
• Mozilla Firefox
• Mozilla Thunderbird
• NetNewsWire
• OpenOffice.org
• PasswordSafeSWT
• PHP
  
• ArcSoft PhotoStudio (was bundled with my scanner)
  
• Skype
• TextWrangler
• TNEF's Enough
• Tunnelblick
• VMware Fusion 

Interesting: Just 13 months ago (as it has been for more than ten years), every laptop and desktop computer in our company was running Windows (with Linux servers and a few Macs for testing). Today one third of the company works on a Mac...

TinyMCE 3.0 final Released

TinyMCE 3.0 final Released:

"These are some of the big changes since the 2.1.3 version.

* Core is completely rewritten and optimized.
* Smaller download size and less files to load.
* Improved Safari support.
* New and improved API, documented at wiki.moxiecode.com."

How Rackspace Now Uses MapReduce and Hadoop to Query Terabytes of Data

Todd Hoff and Bill Boebel at High Scalability - How Rackspace Now Uses MapReduce and Hadoop to Query Terabytes of Data:

 "The system stores over 800 million objects (an object = a user event such as receiving an email or logging into IMAP) within Solr and 9.6 billion within Hadoop, which equals 6.3 TB compressed.

[...] For example, we wanted to build a tool that would allow our customers to search their logs directly. We had been keeping an eye on the Apache Hadoop project since its inception, and were extremely impressed with its progress and direction. Hadoop is an open-source implementation of Google File System and MapReduce... a system that is designed specifically for large scale distributed data processing. It scales out it's workload horizontally by adding servers and distributing the data and MapReduce jobs amongst the servers. Other companies were already using it for their own log processing. So chose to go with Hadoop. In about 3 months we build a fresh new log processing system using Hadoop, Lucene and Solr." 

Hacking the Noosphere

Jon Udell - Hacking the Noosphere:

"Think back to that band of chimps watching one of its members learn out how to use a termite stick. With humans, as with chimps, it's monkey see, monkey do. We learn by watching and imitating. For most of human history, humans learned how to use tools by watching other humans use those tools, then copying the behavior.

But it's a funny thing. Although we feel hyperconnected in the era of networked communication, it turns out that we have surprisingly few chances to watch and imitate how other people use their software tools and information systems.

When we're sitting side by side, we can look over each others' shoulders, and watch, and learn. But for decentralized teams, voice and text are still the dominant modes of communication, and they don't enable that same kind of direct transfer of knowledge and experience.

Screensharing can mediate that direct transfer synchronously, in realtime. For that reason, I think it's critical for us to get to the point where it's just as trivial to share screens and keyboards remotely as it is to set up a text or voice session.

One reason why this matters has to do with tacit, or unconscious, knowledge. Things we know how to do, but don't really know that we know, and can't articulate or explain."

Standard-compliant cross-browser implementation of XMLHttpRequest object

"This project [xmlhttprequest] aims to:

• Deliver standard-compliant (W3C) cross-browser implementation of the XMLHttpRequest object
• Fix ALL browsers quirks observed in their native XMLHttpRequest object implementations
• Enable transparent logging of XMLHttpRequest object activity"

Where did the intranets go?

Jason Fried - Where did the intranets go?:

"When we were still doing client work back in the early 2000s we got a lot of calls about designing intranets. Everyone wanted an intranet. The employees we talked to loved their intranets too—their jobs depended on having access to bits of information, files, forms, etc. that were only available on their company intranet.

But since then I haven’t heard much noise from the intranet camp. Have people given up because the options were too complicated? Or have they built their own? Or are they piecing together blogs and wikis and file storage services and online calendars to get the job done?"

The comments are talking a lot about Microsoft SharePoint... 

Question: Does the URI Length Recommendation of 255 bytes Matter Anymore?

M. David Peterson at the O'Reilly XML Blog - Question: Does the URI Length Recommendation of 255 bytes Matter Anymore?:

"RFC 2068 is about a week shy of being 11 years old. Is the 255 byte URI length recommendation still applicable? From the client perspective, possibly not. But what about from the proxy perspective? And are there clients (possibly mobile browsers?) that I’m not taking into consideration that still impose a limitation on the URI length?

[...] As of October 27th, 2007 the limit inside of Internet Explorer is 2083 bytes." 

Comment by Brian McCallister: "1024 is max as some proxies truncate for you :-/"

The Mythical 5%

Bruce Eckel - The Mythical 5%:

"Usually the things that make or break a project are process and people issues. The way that you work on a day-to-day basis. Who your architects are, who your managers are, and who you are working with on the programming team. How you communicate, and most importantly how you solve process and people problems when they come up. The fastest way to get stuck is to think that it's all about the technology and to believe that you can ram your way through the other things. Those other things are the most likely ones to stop you cold.

In my first jobs, I saw lots of managers making stupid decisions, and so, logically, I came to the conclusion that managers and management was stupid. It's a commonly held belief in our profession: if you're not smart enough to deal with the technology, you go into management. Over time I very slowly learned that the task of management wasn't stupid, it's just very, very hard. That's why all those stupid decisions are still being made; management is much harder than technology because it involves virtually no deterministic factors. It's all guesswork, so if you don't have good intuition you'll probably make stupid decisions.

[...] There's one more very important maxim from Gerald Weinberg which doesn't really answer anything as much as gives you a way to understand what happens. He says: "Things are the way they are because they got that way ... one logical step at a time." It's the legendary frog in the saucepan. So from your fresh new perspective things might look ridiculous, but remember that each decision on the way was made by someone weighing the issues and making what seemed like the best choice at the time. This viewpoint doesn't solve the problem but it can make you more compassionate about the people who are stuck there."

RESTful Thoughts on a Web 2.0 Python Project

Gloria W. - RESTful Thoughts on a Web 2.0 Python Project:

"It helps tremendously to work out the ‘chatter’ between the client and the server in human language before designing it. Here is an example of RESTful chatter between a client inventory application, and it’s corresponding server application: [...]

The point of the chatter is to ensure that the client is passing a complete transaction with every request, and that the server passes a complete transaction with every response. Similar to the CRC cards for OO design, the Chatter ensures that you have your states, transactions and interfaces well defined."

Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered

David Greiner - Ensuring your HTML emails look great and get delivered:

"In this article that goes hand-in-hand with the release of Emails-Standards.org, David Greiner explains what you need to do to ensure that your emails not only look great in today’s email clients but also actually make it to where they’re going."

Alexa Site Thumbnail

Amazon.com: "The Alexa Site Thumbnail web service provides developers with programmatic access to thumbnail images for the home pages of web sites. It offers access to Alexa's large and growing collection of images, gathered from its comprehensive web crawl.

[...] If a requested thumbnail image does not yet exist, it will be automatically generated within 24 hours."

How can I learn to scale my project?

Todd Hoff at High Scalability - How can I learn to scale my project?:

"The center of your design should be the data store, not a process. You transition the data store from state to state, securely and reliably, in small increments.

[...] Viewing an application as a series of state transitions instead of a blizzard of actions and events is a way under appreciated design perspective. This is one of they key design approaches for making robust embedded systems."

StarOffice 8 Server

"A J2EE web service client sends the document to the StarOffice 8 Server and receives the converted Acrobat PDF document immediately."

Talk at Yale: Part 3 of 3

Joel Spolsky - Talk at Yale: Part 3 of 3:

"Being able to write clearly on technical topics is the difference between being a grunt individual contributor programmer and being a leader."

Go RBAC now

Roger A. Grimes at InfoWorld - Go RBAC now:

"Let's assume that application developers do know exactly what permissions are needed for each task in their application -- and this is indeed true of any application developed with RBAC in mind. The developers create application-specific groups that mimic the various roles that an end-user would perform in their application." 

Advanced JavaScript III

Howard Feldman at ONLamp.com - Advanced JavaScript III:

"In this final article of the series, we proceed with another handful of useful JavaScript case studies that focus on manipulating and rewriting the HTML page on-the-fly using Document Object Model (DOM).

[...] Dynamic Tables: It is often desirable in a user interface to have the user input data into a variable number of rows. For example, when filling out an order form, the customer will fill in one item per row. With JavaScript, we no longer have to worry if we put enough space for the order though—let the user add and delete rows as needed!"

The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts)

Mark Pilgrim about the Amazon Kindle - The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts):

"Another possible change: with connected books, the tether between the author and the book is still active after purchase. Errata can be corrected instantly. Updates, no problem.

Newsweek, The Future of Reading

Day by day and almost minute by minute the past was brought up to date. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown by documentary evidence to have been correct; nor was any item of news, or any expression of opinion, which conflicted with the needs of the moment, ever allowed to remain on record. All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and reinscribed exactly as often as was necessary.

George Orwell, “1984″, Book One, Chapter 3"

The Future of Reading

Steven Levy announces the Amazon Kindle e-Book reader in Newsweek - The Future of Reading: 

"Microsoft's Bill Hill has a riff where he runs through the energy-wasting, resource-draining process of how we make books now. We chop down trees, transport them to plants, mash them into pulp, move the pulp to another factory to press into sheets, ship the sheets to a plant to put dirty marks on them, then cut the sheets and bind them and ship the thing around the world. "Do you really believe that we'll be doing that in 50 years?" he asks."

Jing’s the thing

Jon Udell - Jing’s the thing:

"When the TechSmith folks told me about Jing I was thinking about screencasting at a different level: professional quality, careful editing, multiple delivery formats. So I made note of it, but didn’t fully appreciate its significance."

What's New? WebDAV!

dotCMS - What's New in 1.5?: "WebDAV access to CMS File Repository"

PHProjekt - Summer of PHProjekt Addons: "PFolders is a WebDAV Interface for PHProjekt which enables you to access the file repository of the filemanager from PHProjekt without the web interface of PHProjekt."

KnowledgeTree - Release Notes for Version 3.4.5: " WebDAV and Network Pack made Open Source and added to core."

Sounds like a pattern... 

Flux

"From the Flux Operations Console, you can check on the status of jobs and workflows, remove jobs, recover jobs that have failed, reschedule jobs, perform other job maintenance, and monitor file transfer progress."

Evidence Based Scheduling

Joel Spolsky - Evidence Based Scheduling:

"Individual development tasks are easy to estimate, because you’ve written subroutines, created dialogs, and parsed files before.

If you are sloppy, and pick big three-week tasks (e.g., “Implement Ajax photo editor”), then you haven’t thought about what you are going to do. In detail. Step by step. And when you haven’t thought about what you’re going to do, you can’t know how long it will take.

Setting a 16-hour maximum forces you to design the damn feature."

Alfresco JLAN Server

"Alfresco JLAN uses a virtual file system interface that allows you to plug in your own file system implementation with the core server handling all of the network protocol exchange between the client and server. JLAN is also the only Java implementation of Window’s CIFS (Common Internet File System), in addition to supporting NFS and FTP."

Database parallelism choices greatly impact scalability

Sam Madden in The Database Column - Database parallelism choices greatly impact scalability:

"Because shared nothing [as in IBM DB2] does not typically have nearly as severe bus or resource contention as shared-memory [MySQL] or shared-disk [Oracle RAC] machines, shared nothing can be made to scale to hundreds or even thousands of machines. Because of this, it is generally regarded as the best-scaling architecture. "

Exploring Leopard with DTrace

Greg Miller at MacTech - Exploring Leopard with DTrace:

"A few years back, Sun Microsystems developed DTrace: a new and innovative way to trace running software on live systems. DTrace enables developers and administrators to "see" what their code, and others' code, is doing in a flexible and dynamic way. With the release of Leopard, Apple has brought DTrace to Mac OS X.

This article will begin with a crash course in DTrace. If you're already a seasoned DTrace veteran, feel free to skip that section. We will then move on to some examples of how to use DTrace by exploring our Leopard systems and discovering what makes them purr."

Using LDAP groups in a web application

Is there a standard way to integrate a web application with LDAP groups? Let's see what others are doing: 

• Confluence supports both "static groups" (the group's LDAP entry lists user DNs or IDs in an attribute like "member" or "memberUid" - typical objectClasses are "posixGroup" and "groupOfNames") and "dynamic groups" (the user entry lists group DNs in an attribute like "member" or "memberOf"; Active Directory does the latter). Which (static) groups are being read can be defined with a custom LDAP query filter ("baseGroupNamespace" and "groupSearchAllDepths" configuration settings).
• Trac seems to use just "static groups". What's interesting is that they can store permissions directly in LDAP, with "objectclass: trac" and "tracperm" attributes. They're distinguishing group and user DNs internally by prefixing groups with an "@" character. They also filter which groups are being used ("group_rdn" configuration setting).
• Drupal can work with both group types. They mention the problem with hierarchical group membership...
• Typo3 I'm not sure about - the documented configuration settings sound like they only support "dynamic groups" ("use memberOf-Attribute", "build usergroup"), but at the bottom of the page they say: "Can I assign users to groups?Yes, currently standard implementations of AD, NDS and OpenLDAP are supported."

Update (2007-11-14):

• Liferay has a detailed explanation of their LDAP integration. They've got a configuration setting "ldap.import.method" which is set to "user" or "group", depending on from which side group membership is to be read.

Operations is a competitive advantage...

Jesse Robins at O'Reilly Radar - Operations is a competitive advantage... (Secret Sauce for Startups!):

"In my experience it takes about 80 hours to bootstrap a startup. This generally means installing and configuring an automated infrastructure management system (puppet), version control system (subversion), continuous build and test (frequently cruisecontrol.rb), software deployment (capistrano), monitoring (currently evaluating Hyperic, Zenoss, and Groundwork). Once this is done the "install time" is reduced to nearly zero and requires no specialized knowledge."

What about research, interviews, and documentation?

Ryan Singer - Ask 37signals: What about research, interviews, and documentation?:

"It’s like a conversation. You don’t sit down at the cafe, listen to your friend for two hours straight, and then talk for two hours straight. You take turns, constantly going back and forth, and the discussion finds its way.

Of course, you might wonder how to start. We build products we need ourselves, so our initial research is made of our own wishes, itches, and frustrations. When it comes to client work, my best advise is to become friends. Spend time together and discuss what they do until you can see through their eyes a bit."

Squish

"The Squish for Web edition enables testing HTML-based Web and Web 2.0 (Ajax) applications in different web browsers running on different platforms.

Squish for Web is, unlike many available web testing tools, not restricted to a single web browser or platform. Squish for Web supports running and recording tests for web applications in Microsoft Internet Explorer, Mozilla, Firefox, Apple's Safari and KDE's Konqueror on Windows, Linux, Unix and Mac OS X."

Yahoo! Susceptible to Cross Site Request Forgery (XSRF) Attacks

Nitesh Dhanjani - Yahoo! Susceptible to Cross Site Request Forgery (XSRF) Attacks:

"It is possible for malicious sites to add or delete arbitrary Yahoo! calendar entries. The following HTML on a malicious site will add a Task and Event to the victim’s Yahoo! calendar."

rBuilder

"rBuilder is the first and only development tool that simplifies and automates the creation of software appliances. rBuilder combines powerful features with innovative packaging techniques to yield a repeatable appliance creation process."

Sphinx - Free open-source SQL full-text search engine

"Sphinx is a full-text search engine, distributed under GPL version 2.

[...] Generally, it's a standalone search engine, meant to provide fast, size-efficient and relevant fulltext search functions to other applications. Sphinx was specially designed to integrate well with SQL databases and scripting languages. Currently built-in data sources support fetching data either via direct connection to MySQL or PostgreSQL, or using XML pipe mechanism (a pipe to indexer in special XML-based format which Sphinx recognizes)."

The largest installation has indexed over 1 billion records. 

War Criminal

Andrew Sullivan - War Criminal:

"The decision to allow one man - the decider - to pre-empt and knowingly distort the rule of law in order to detain and torture anyone he wants - is a function not of conservatism, but of fascism.

[...] There is no doubt - no doubt at all - that these tactics are torture and subject to prosecution as war crimes.

[...] We have war criminals in the White House. What are we going to do about it?"

Building and Blogging again

Adam Bosworth - Building and Blogging again:

"Some extremely clear-headed and smart people can work out everything abstractly in their heads and then just go and implement it. I’m not one of them. Watching me write code is like watching an indecisive sculptor work with clay. I shape it. I look. I wince. I reshape it. I play with it. I wince some more. I ask my friends, nurse my wounds, and then reshape it yet again. And so on. Constant iterative development."

Key + Data

Sam Ruby - Key + Data:

"What do dynamo, memcached, Berkley DB, and couchdb have in common with each other, and in many ways with other structures like my hard drive or your mail or the www? Namely that everything is accessed by a primary key, and that metadata is either attached to, or embedded within, that data."

Big Requirements Up Front

Philip C. Plumlee at ONLamp.com - Big Requirements Up Front:

"Phased delivery and merciless refactoring are not merely ways to prepare for unknowable requirements. They are a system to find a cheap path to a valuable goal. Even if the goal is well known, the path is not."

MailChimp Inbox Inspector

"Whenever you create an email campaign, do you spend hours testing it in all your different email programs and ISP accounts and spam filters? Or do you just click "send" and pray to the email gods? We feel your pain. That's why we created the MailChimp Inbox Inspector..."

Log Everything All the Time

Todd Hoff - Log Everything All the Time:

"But then I make each process have a command port hosting a simple embedded web server and telnet processor so you can change debug levels and other setting on the fly through the web or telnet interface. This is pretty handy in the field and during development.

I can hear many of you saying this is too inefficient. We could never log all that data! That's crazy! No true. I've worked on very sensitive high performance real-time embedded systems where every nanosecond was dear and they still had very high levels of logging, even in driver land. It's in how you do it."

Strategy Letter VI

Joel Spolsky - Strategy Letter VI:

"The third phase with PCs was Macintosh and Windows. A standard, consistent user interface with features like multiple windows and the Clipboard designed so that applications could work together. The increased usability and power we got out of the new GUIs made personal computing explode.

So if history repeats itself, we can expect some standardization of Ajax user interfaces to happen in the same way we got Microsoft Windows. Somebody is going to write a compelling SDK that you can use to make powerful Ajax applications with common user interface elements that work together."

The evil that is fear: banning religion from US prisons

Greg Beaver - The evil that is fear: banning religion from US prisons:

"The past 6 years have seen an unprecedented rise in the institutionalization of fear as public policy in the United States. This is of course primarily due to the attacks of 9/11, but not because of the terrorist attacks. The institutionalization of fear is entirely due to our political leaders, led at the top by a president but followed by the many lawmakers within the legislative branch independent of political party. The unprecedented abuse of fundamental clauses of our Constitution such as the right to have no unreasonable search and seizure, the right not to be tortured, and now even the freedom of religion all result from the institutionalization of fear as a policy of government.

[...] Focusing all resources on anti-terrorism directly resulted in the unpreparedness of FEMA to deal with Hurricane Katrina, which is empirically a much greater threat to the life and liberty of Americans than terrorism (many more hurricanes hit the US than do terrorists).  Please help America put a halt to the madness of fear-governed policy, and minimally participate in government by calling or emailing your representatives.  It is time for U.S. citizens to turn the empty rhetoric about freedom and democracy so often foisted upon other countries into true freedom and democracy at home."

Seattle

Joel Spolsky - Seattle:

"If you ever started a new project by writing code, and you thought you’d “design as you went along,” what you’re doing is driving around with the handbrakes on. Here’s why. Designing a feature by writing a thoughtful spec takes about 1/10th as much time as writing the code for that feature—or less. If you try to code as you design, then you’re interrupting your short spurts of design with long spurts of coding."

Watch out for CouchDB

Andrew Tetlaw at SitePoint - Watch out for CouchDB:

"A view is a dynamic structure that acts like a search query, providing a virtual table of documents matching the query. The query, previously expressed in a proprietary language, is now a JavaScript function which is used to determine which documents to include in the view. Because the views are completely virtual you can have as many as you like and you can add or remove them at any time without touching any of your data. Views are indexed and regularly updated to keep tabs with the state of the documents in the database.

CouchDB has some other impressive attributes; it’s fully ACID compliant, has a security model built in, bi-directional incremental replication and conflict resolution."

Holding a Program in One's Head

Paul Graham - Holding a Program in One's Head:

"Perhaps it will help to understand that the way programmers behave is driven by the demands of the work they do. It's not because they're irresponsible that they work in long binges during which they blow off all other obligations, plunge straight into programming instead of writing specs first, and rewrite code that already works. It's not because they're unfriendly that they prefer to work alone, or growl at people who pop their head in the door to say hello. This apparently random collection of annoying habits has a single explanation: the power of holding a program in one's head."

I'll push and you pull. The mashup approach to application integration

Sean McGrath at ITworld.com - I'll push and you pull. The mashup approach to application integration:

"The mashup phenomenon begs a very pertinent question: can all application integration scenarios that we naturally express in push-centric language, be implemented with pull-centric designs? Is there a limit to what you can do with a mashup - something that would force you to a push-centric approach instead? If every time A needs to send something to B why not get A to publish it, with an RSS/Atom feed instead. Then B can just poll the published information as it sees fit."

WebRunner

Joe 'Zonker' Brockmeier at Linux.com - Mozilla begets WebRunner, a site-specific browser:

"To provide a more suitable tool for Web-based apps, Mozilla Platform Evangelist Mark Finkle has been working on WebRunner, a site-specific browser (SSB) that's designed to work exclusively with one application at a time."

BrowseBack

Understanding Engineers: Feasibility

Charles Miller - Understanding Engineers: Feasibility:

"Non-trivial contains dangerous unknowns. Some part of it is not yet understood, or lies outside the range of things the programmer has done before, or can quickly imagine a workable solution to. The more experienced the programmer who tells you a problem is non-trivial, the more concerned you should be."

Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF/XSRF) questions and answers

cgisecurity.net - Cross Site Request Forgery (CSRF/XSRF) questions and answers:

"What can I do to protect my own applications?

Setting a short time peroid for user sessions is essential. Sites requiring the user to be logged in before performing an action can set the users session to a short session period (say 5 minutes) to reduce the odds of a sucessfull CSRF attack. In conjunction with this prompt the user with a login page or strong CAPTCHA each time an important site action is performed.

[...] A popular suggestion to preventing CSRF involves appending session tokens to each request. This method is documented in multiple documents however as pointed out in mailing list postings an attacker can utilize an existing browser vulnerability or XSS flaw to grab this session token. Assuming that your browser is patched and free from all vulnerabilities including through plugin's such as Flash/Acrobat all the time (keep dreaming), and that your website is free from all types of XSS, then the token method may be considered a suitable solution."

WWW SQL Designer

Ondřej Žára - WWW SQL Designer: "Online tool for designing relational database schemas. Works fine in all three major browsers (Gecko, MSIE, Opera) and features schema saving, exporting to xml and sql script creation." Take a look at the demo.

(Found via Ryan Eby.)

Release 1.0

O'Reilly Radar - Release 1.0:

"Esther Dyson edited Release 1.0 from 1983 to November 2006, when O'Reilly acquired the newsletter and updated it to Release 2.0. It is our great pleasure to offer, free of charge, electronic versions of all back issues of Release 1.0. Each issue offers insights into a topic just before it went mainstream."

Fun with PDFs on Mac OS X

The built-in PDF support in OS X is simply great. I just found two additional helpers:

• creating PDFs from office documents via OpenOffice, on the command line - Batch Converting Legacy Documents at XML.com (copy & paste their Basic macro, write ""/Applications/OpenOffice.org 2.1.app//Contents/MacOS/program/soffice" -invisible 'macro:///Standard.Module1.SaveAsPDF("/Users/tim/Desktop/test.ppt")'" into a shell script and run it with "open-x11 test.sh")
• combining PDFs from the command line - Combine PDFs without using Automator at macosxhints.com ("python '/System/Library/Automator/Combine PDF Pages.action/Contents/Resources/join.py' -o '/Users/tim/Desktop/output.pdf' '/Users/tim/Desktop/hello world.pdf' '/Users/tim/Desktop/hello world 2.pdf'")

Alfresco Web Services Revisited

David Caruana - Alfresco Web Services Revisited:

"ECM should rethink the way it provides Web Services. Imagine being able to expose your enterprise content resources (folders, documents, searches, categories, versions, discussions, workflows etc) to your network with the minimum of effort; distributed resources that can be retrieved, managed, mashed by any part of your enterprise software suite."

Which theory fits the evidence?

Reginald Braithwaite - Which theory fits the evidence?:

"Theory P [= probabilistic] adherents believe that the normal case for software projects is that tasks are rarely completed exactly as estimated, but that as a project progresses, the aggregate variance from estimates falls.

Theory D [= fully deterministic] adherents believe that the most important element of successful software development is planning. If a plan is properly constructed for the design and development of a software project, the actual implementation is virtually guaranteed."

A reminder about the power of email

Matt Linderman of 37signals - A reminder about the power of email:

"It was a reminder of how much power there is in email. We forget that the RSS-centric world we live in isn’t the one many (and probably most) of our customers live in. They don’t have the time or energy to keep up with the constant stream of info at our blogs. That’s why the old-fashioned occasional email update — which gives people the juiciest bits and leaves out the rest — still has so much power."

Optimizing Web Applications and Content for iPhone

Apple Developer Connection - Optimizing Web Applications and Content for iPhone:

"The following guidelines will help you prepare web content and design a website or web-based application for iPhone. If you are a seasoned web developer, there are probably just a few refinements you can make to ensure that your site looks great and works best on iPhone."

The big content system integration II

Michael Edson at the Really Strategies Blog - The big content system integration II:

"It has a central repository built of two fundamental parts - XML and binary content (images, etc.). Work done in page layout tools/editorial tools/workflow tools is transitory (though might be archived). The purpose of the repository would be to accurately manage 'content' of published products and to also provide a starting point for initial manuscript creation for the next stage in the cycle."

User stories

Wikipedia - User story:

"When the time has come for creating user stories, one of the developers gets together with a customer representative. The customer is responsible for formulating the user stories. The developer may use a series of questions to get the customer going, such as asking if some particular functionality is desired, but must be careful not to dominate the idea creation process."

On extremeprogramming.org: "User Stories are written by the customers as things that the system needs to do for them. They are similar to usage scenarios, except that they are not limited to describing a user interface. They are in the format of about three sentences of text written by the customer in the customers terminology without techno-syntax."

IBM Lotus Connections

• Profiles - Find the people you need

• Communities - Work with people who share common interests and expertise

• Blogs - Present your own ideas, and learn from others

• Dogear - Save and share bookmarks

• Activities - Organize your work and tap your professional network"

Verschärfte Vernehmung

Tim Bray - Verschärfte Vernehmung:

"Andrew Sullivan points out prior use of the term “Enhanced Interrogation”, promoted not only by the malevolent thickheads of the Bush administration but by most of the Republican candidates for President; prior use, that is, by the Gestapo. Meanwhile Dick Cheney argues that the Geneva Convention and the U.S. Constitution are tools for terrorists. [...] In the American context, near as I can tell, at the moment “conservative” means “pro-torture” which means “scum”."

 Andrew Sullivan - "Verschärfte Vernehmung":

"The Nazi defense of the techniques is almost verbatim that of the Bush administration... [...] Freezing prisoners to near-death, repeated beatings, long forced-standing, waterboarding, cold showers in air-conditioned rooms, stress positions [Arrest mit Verschaerfung], withholding of medicine and leaving wounded or sick prisoners alone in cells for days on end - all these have occurred at US detention camps under the command of president George W. Bush. Over a hundred documented deaths have occurred in these interrogation sessions.

[...] What I am reporting is a simple empirical fact: the interrogation methods approved and defended by this president are not new. Many have been used in the past. The very phrase used by the president to describe torture-that-isn't-somehow-torture - "enhanced interrogation techniques" - is a term originally coined by the Nazis. The techniques are indistinguishable. The methods were clearly understood in 1948 as war-crimes. The punishment for them was death."

ETags are not a panacea

Patrick Mueller - ETags are not a panacea:

"ETags and Last-Modified processing is something you ought to do, if you can afford it, because it does allow for some optimization in your client / server transactions. To be clear, the optimization is that the server doesn't have to send the content it would have sent to the client, as the client has indicated it already has that 'version' of it cached. There is still a round-trip to the server involved. If you're looking for an absolute killer optimization though, you should be looking at Expires and Cache-Control headers.

[...] Expires and friends are killer, because they allow the ultimate in client / server transaction optimization; the transaction is optimized away completely."

DRBD - Distributed Replicated Block Device

"DRBD is a block device which is designed to build high availability clusters. This is done by mirroring a whole block device via (a dedicated) network. You could see it as a network raid-1."

See also:  DRBD for MySQL

The Underbelly of a Web App

Ryan Campbell - The Underbelly of a Web App:

"Since launch, development time now comes in at around 80% (20% goes to support), and only about half of that time is spent implementing features that our users actually see. Here are some of the tasks that aren’t always thought about when making an application, but that eventually need to be considered."

(Via Ryan Eby.) 

Turning OpenOffice.org into a document conversion tool

Dmitri Popov at Linux.com - Turning OpenOffice.org into a document conversion tool:

"JODConverter can help you to unleash OpenOffice.org's file conversion capabilities.

To be able to use OpenOffice.org as a conversion engine, you have to start it as a service. This means launching it without its GUI and making it listen for incoming connections on a particular port. To do this, launch OpenOffice.org using the following command on Linux:

soffice -headless -accept="socket,port=8100;urp;"

Outsource the Government

Scott Adams - Outsource the Government:

"The Indians who graduated from the Indian Institute of Technology are among the smartest people on the planet. And whatever they don’t already know, they can learn while you’re watching American Idol. Yeah, it hurts. But it’s true."

"remove the web developer and the web gets developed"

Tim O'Reilly at O'Reilly Radar - "remove the web developer and the web gets developed":

"One wouldn't think of Wikipedia as a news site, but it has indeed become one, as users find that they can make the software do what they want, rather than what it (originally) wanted. Ease of use can lead to new uses..."

Yahoo! Open Source CMS Conference: Alfresco

Andrew Savikas at O'Reilly Radar - Yahoo! Open Source CMS Conference:

"I saw Alfresco for the first time a year ago, and while I was impressed with their workflow and document management features, I thought their web app was a bit heavyweight for folks used to working directly off of a filesystem (either GUI or command-line). The newest release of Alfresco seems to target that concern very well. They've implemented CIFS so their repository function just like a network drive on a desktop (works on Windows and Mac). So unlike WebDAV, the user gets all the expected context (right-click) items, and file metadata and properties are handled much more fully than WebDAV."

Subversion lokal unter Mac OS X

Florian Munz - Subversion lokal unter Mac OS X:

"Unter OS X Subversion für die lokale Nutzung zu installieren, d.h. ohne Apache/WebDAV-Unterstützung ist eigentlich ganz einfach, wenn man weiß wie es geht :)"

Und dann das Buch: Version Control with Subversion

alahup!

Tags run amok!

Clay Shirky at Many-to-Many - Tags run amok!:

"Back In The Day, when I was trying to explain what I meant when I was talking about social software, but before Coates pulled my fat out of the fire by doing the work for me, I had all these wicked abstruse definitions that made everyone’s eyes glaze over.

The only definition I ever found that created the lighbulb moment I was feeling was “Social software is stuff that gets spammed.” Not a perfect definition, but servicable in its way."

Alone Time

37signals - Getting Real: Alone Time:

"Set up a rule at work: Make half the day alone time. From 10am-2pm, no one can talk to one another (except during lunch). Or make the first or the last half of the day the alone time period. Just make sure this period is contiguous in order to avoid productivity-killing interruptions.

A successful alone time period means letting go of communication addiction. During alone time, give up instant messenging, phone calls, and meetings. Avoid any email thread that's going to require an immediate response. Just shut up and get to work."

Mindquarry

"The Mindquarry Collaboration Server is a set of well proven professional collaboration tools made easy to be usable for everyone.

[...] Mindquarry supports teamwork. Mindquarry allows you to share files, exchange ideas and definitions, manage tasks for yourself and your team, and organize talk via e-mail, instant messenger or real-world meetings."

Bookmarklets - The Evil Lurking In Your Browser

Patrick Hunlock - Bookmarklets - The Evil Lurking In Your Browser:

"Bookmarklets are incredibly useful tools. They can put your favorite sites at your fingertips as easy as dragging the icon in the location bar to your bookmark bar -- you can also drag RSS feeds, and you can drag scripts. While mostly benign, often very useful, and definitely under-exploited, bookmarklets are one of the biggest security holes lurking in your browser in addition to being the biggest thing waiting to hit the web since Ajax."

Seven steps to remarkable customer service

Joel Spolsky - Seven steps to remarkable customer service:

"We treat each tech support call like the NTSB treats airliner crashes. Every time a plane crashes, they send out investigators, figure out what happened, and then figure out a new policy to prevent that particular problem from ever happening again. It’s worked so well for aviation safety that the very, very rare airliner crashes we still get in the US are always very unusual, one-off situations."

HTTP/1.1 Activity Diagram

Alan Dean - HTTP/1.1 (DELETE, GET, HEAD, PUT, POST):

"An activity diagram to describe the resolution of the response status code, given various headers."

Access Denied - Firefox 2.0 breaks access keys on the PC

David Cummings - Access Denied - Firefox 2.0 breaks access keys on the PC:

"Firefox 2.0 doesn't actually break access keys, as was originally thought. Rather, the Firefox developers fixed a different bug that was four years old and decided to change access keys from Alt plus the number/letter to Alt plus Shift plus the number/letter."

Woof

"Woof is a small simple stupid webserver that can easily be invoked on a single file. [...] Just do a

$ woof filename 

and tell the recipient the URL woof spits out. When he got that file, woof will quit and everything is done."

Learning from Founders

Paul Graham - Learning from Founders:

"Suits do not help people to think better. I bet most executives at big companies do their best thinking when they wake up on Sunday morning and go downstairs in their bathrobe to make a cup of coffee. That's when you have ideas. Just imagine what a company would be like if people could think that well at work."

Pipes and Filters for the Internet

Tim O'Reilly at O'Reilly Radar - Pipes and Filters for the Internet:

"Yahoo!'s new Pipes service is a milestone in the history of the internet. It's a service that generalizes the idea of the mashup, providing a drag and drop editor that allows you to connect internet data sources, process them, and redirect the output. Yahoo! describes it as "an interactive feed aggregator and manipulator" that allows you to "create feeds that are more powerful, useful and relevant." While it's still a bit rough around the edges, it has enormous promise in turning the web into a programmable environment for everyone."

Why Isn't System Administration Evolving?

Luke A. Kanies at O'Reilly Sysadmin - Why Isn't System Administration Evolving?:

"Imagine the best books on development only covering how to write code, and skipping over all the hard bits, like design or testing. Now imagine there only being about four books on development. Ouch. Welcome to my world. I’ve said it many times: The state of system administration is pitiful. The tools are horrible, there’s no community to speak of, best practice is essentially non-existent, there are basically no tools with open and active development communities, there are almost no startups trying to solve these problems, and no one really seems to care. Heck, there aren’t really even any sysadmin bloggers; we’ve got 234,486 people blathering on about Web 2.0, and they’re all depending on one guy with SSH and a for loop to build and maintain their network because no one’s even talking about system administration."

Some of My Software Opinions

Obie Fernandez - Some of My Software Opinions:

"The best way to keep developers motivated and productive is to keep them focused on delivering business value."

dhtmlxTree

A guide for switching to a Mac

Adam Pash - A guide for switching to a Mac:

"When I bought my first Mac a few short months ago, it took a while to figure out how to do all the stuff I already knew how to do on my PC. While it's my job to spend time figuring that sort of thing out, there's no need for you to waste your precious time figuring out the minutia of a new operating system. To ease this transition for all of the new Mac owners out there, I've put together a quick guide for Mac newbies making the big switch."

53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without

Smashing Magazine - 53 CSS-Techniques You Couldn’t Live Without:

"Over the last few years web-developers have written many articles about CSS and developed many useful techniques, which can save you a lot of time - of course, if you are able to find them in time. Below you’ll find a list of techniques we , as web-architects, really couldn’t live without."

Microsoft Photo Info

"Microsoft Photo Info allows photographers to add, change and delete common "metadata" properties for digital photographs from inside Windows Explorer.

When installed, a new "Photo Info" item appears on the context menu for files selected in Windows Explorer. To use, simply select one or more image fiiles, right-click and choose "Photo Info" to open the Photo Info properties editor. You can edit metadata for files individually, or all together as a batch. Photo Info reads and writes metadata in IPTC and XMP formats (depending on file type)."

Lotus Quickr and Lotus Connections

"IBM Lotus Quickr will provide ready-to-use team places where team members -- inside or outside the firewall -- can share information and collaborate on projects online.

[...] Users can access content in Lotus Quickr right from their familiar Microsoft Windows desktop. They simply drag documents from their C-drive folders to personal or shared Lotus Quickr places. Or, they can save documents to Lotus Quickr folders directly from the application they are using."

"Lotus Connections has five Web 2.0-based components -- Activities, Communities, Dogear, Profiles and Blogs -- that help business people quickly connect and build new relationships based on their individual needs.

[...] Lotus Connections integrates across the Lotus portfolio, combining the strength of the industry's leading real-time, messaging and portal capabilities with the power of social software. For example, with Lotus Notes version 8 and Lotus Connections, customers will be able to access Activities on the side bar from their Lotus Notes inbox and drag and drop email messages directly into an activity. Websphere Portal and Lotus Connections customers can leverage the light weight portlets to display new Dogear bookmarks, recent blogs entries and search Profiles to locate an expert.

[...] Lotus Connections also integrates with Microsoft Active Directories. With support for open standards such as ATOM and REST, Lotus Connections makes it easy for enterprises to integrate social software into their existing IT infrastructures and their day-to-day tools."

Switch

This week, my 2-year-old Acer TravelMate running Windows XP has been replaced by a 17" Apple MacBook Pro. The switch went surprisingly well so far (with a little help from Mac-experienced colleagues).

Here's the software I've installed so far:

• Adium
• Firefox
• Fugu
• iTerm
• OpenOffice
• Skype
• Smultron
• Thunderbird
• Tunnelblick
• VMware Fusion

Amazon S3 is everywhere

Marc Hedlund at O'Reilly Radar - Amazon S3 is everywhere:

"Seems to me that everywhere I turn, I'm hearing about someone doing something cool with Amazon S3. Here's a collection of some of the things I've noticed."

Java's "Operations" Problem

Timothy M. O'Brien at ONJava - Java's "Operations" Problem:

"Tell a really capable Debian admin that they are going to have to support a bunch of Java applications, and they will subconsciously shudder. Sysadmins are, by definition, OS focused, they enjoy dealing with native applications, and they tend to fear the JVM as it is an abstraction."

Firebug

"Firebug integrates with Firefox to put a wealth of development tools at your fingertips while you browse. You can edit, debug, and monitor CSS, HTML, and JavaScript live in any web page."

Trusted feeds

Jon Udell - Trusted feeds:

"As several folks rightly pointed out in comments here, a community site based on tagging and syndication is exquisitely vulnerable to abuse. In the first incarnation of the photos page, for example, a malicious person could have posted something awful to Flickr and it would have shown up on that page."

Adobe Acrobat JavaScript Execution Bug is a Huge Security Issue

Nitesh Dhanjani at ONLamp - Adobe Acrobat JavaScript Execution Bug is a Huge Security Issue:

"The Adobe JavaScript execution bug recently discovered is a huge security issue for any organization that serves PDF files via its web servers.

[...] An attacker could embed malicious JavaScript code to have the cookie value for your Google/GMail session sent to him or her by making you click on a URL."

OpenID for non-SuperUsers

Sam Ruby - OpenID for non-SuperUsers:

"Based on the results of my Unobtrusive OpenID post, it is quite evident that there is a lot of partial knowledge about OpenID out there. While my knowledge on the subject is far from complete, this post is my attempt to share what I have learned with others. The target audience for the bulk of this post is people who are capable of adding autodiscovery links to their blog templates, may be able to install a small PHP script and/or knows what a HTTP header is."

IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition

"IBM OmniFind Yahoo! Edition is a no-charge, entry-level enterprise search software solution that enables rapid deployment of intranet and file system search for both employees and customers.

• Up to 500,000 documents
• Support for 200+ file types
• [...]
  
• Built on Apache Lucene
• Open URL-based APIs (REST)"

yEd

"yEd is a very powerful graph editor that is written entirely in the Java programming language. It can be used to quickly and effectively generate drawings and to apply automatic layouts to a range of different diagrams and networks."

(Via Norbert Ehreke.) 

A conversation with Jon Udell about his new job with Microsoft

Jon Udell - A conversation with Jon Udell about his new job with Microsoft:

"For those of us in the club, it's a golden age. With computers and networks and information systems we can invent new things almost as fast as we can think them up. But we're leaving a lot of folks behind. And I'm not just talking about the digital divide that separates the Internet haves from the have-nots. Even among the haves, the ideas and tools and methods that some of us take for granted haven't really put down roots in the mainstream.

Over the years I've evangelized a bunch of things to the alpha-geek crowd: Internet groupware, blogging, syndication, tagging, web architecture, lightweight integration, microformats, structured search, screencasting, dynamic languages, geographic mapping, random-access audio, and more. There's a purpose behind all this, and Doug Engelbart saw it very clearly a long time ago. The augmentation of human capability in these sorts of ways isn't just some kind of geek chic. It's nothing less than a survival issue for our species."

General-purpose intermediation

Jon Udell - General-purpose intermediation:

"But slogger notwithstanding, there's a much deeper and more general thing that ought to be happening on every web-enabled system. It ought to be trivial to attach an observer and/or filter to HTTP pipelines. Among other things, it could shovel data into a search engine so that I could instantly recall a remembered transaction by search term, by date, or by site."

Intalio Workflow

"Intalio|Workflow is an integrated human workflow suite based on the new BPEL4People extensions and compatible with any JSR 168 portal. Because it offers an AJAX-based XForms implementation, it gives workflow participants a productive and engaging user experience, while remaining compatible with any major web browser in use today."

Sphinx - Free open-source SQL full-text search engine

Generally, it's a standalone search engine, meant to provide fast, size-efficient and relevant fulltext search functions to other applications. Sphinx was specially designed to integrate well with SQL databases and scripting languages. Currently built-in data source drivers support fetching data either via direct connection to MySQL, PostgreSQL, or from a pipe in a custom XML format.

Sphinx features

mxGraph

That’s Not Write

Sam Ruby - That’s Not Write:

"I’ve known for a while that pretty much all the browsers don’t implement document.write when found in the context of XHTML documents — even in the case where both the enclosing document and string are separately well formed."

Apple Xserve: The final review

Tom Yager at InfoWorld - Apple Xserve: The final review:

"While trends, or rather, the analysts who proclaim them, are pointing to the triumph of software as a service, outsourced applications, consulting, node-locked operating systems and other pay-as-you-go approaches, Apple is piloting a rocket-powered sled in the opposite direction.

Apple is going to sell complete server platforms that buyers purchase, operate themselves and actually own. Seriously. [...] There are no subscriptions, no priority update service fees, and no client, device, mailbox or CPU licenses."

A Tour of Microsoft's Mac Lab

David Weiss - A Tour of Microsoft's Mac Lab:

"I'm going to write a little bit more about what I do to help MacBU ship great software and provide some color around what's it's like to work on Mac software at Microsoft. Often when we have press events or special visits from our MVPs I'll give them a tour of the Mac Lab and explain what we do. They've always found it very interesting and so I thought I'd share a virtual tour of our Mac Lab."

IBM Lotus Expeditor

"Lotus Expeditor software (a release planned for later in 2006) provides client and the corresponding server-side connectors for these capabilities:

 * Composition. Provides comprehensive universal managed client software for service-oriented architecture (SOA). It can be used to build and deploy composite applications containing components of all types—from Java™ Foundation Class Swing, text terminal, Microsoft Visual Basic and ActiveX and applets to native or Web views like Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (Ajax), Adobe PDF, Java Server Pages and forms. As a result, you can create a visually integrated view and integrated workflow within the composite application—using processes contained in your back-office applications."

Nuxeo Core

xmpp4moz

Optimizing Page Load Time

die.net - Optimizing Page Load Time:

"Instead of relying on the browser to revalidate its cache, if you change an object, change its URL. One simple way to do this for static objects if you have staged pushes is to have the push process create a new directory named by the build number, and teach your site to always reference objects out of the current build's base URL. (Instead of <img src="http://example.com/logo.gif"> you'd use <img src="http://example.com/build/1234/logo.gif">. When you do another build next week, all references change to <img src="http://example.com/build/1235/logo.gif">.) This also nicely solves problems with browsers sometimes caching things longer than they should -- since the URL changed, they think it is a completely different object."

The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing (version 3.0)

Joel Spolsky - The Guerrilla Guide to Interviewing (version 3.0):

"A lot of programmers that you might interview these days are apt to consider recursion, pointers, and even data structures to be a silly implementation detail which has been abstracted away by today’s many happy programming languages. “When was the last time you had to write a sorting algorithm?” they snicker.

Still, I don’t really care. I want my ER doctor to understand anatomy, even if all she has to do is put the computerized defibrillator nodes on my chest and push the big red button, and I want programmers to know programming down to the CPU level, even if Ruby on Rails does read your mind and build a complete Web 2.0 social collaborative networking site for you with three clicks of the mouse."

Why SOA and VoIP will converge

Jon Udell at InfoWorld - Why SOA and VoIP will converge:

"In a world where SOA and VoIP work hand in hand, more natural scenarios become possible. I have, for example, been dealing with a stalled purchase order of my own for several days. The business rule says that I have to contact two parties, who must in turn reach an agreement. But we’ve all been playing voice-mail or e-mail tag, and so far we haven’t managed to close the loop. It’s admittedly creepy to imagine empowering that business rule to detect our common availability, initiate a conference call, and receive a signal from us that tells it to proceed. But the alternative that we constantly endure is arguably worse."

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

Wikipedia: "Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (SICP) is a textbook published in 1985 about general computer programming concepts from MIT Press written by Massachusetts Institute of Technology professors Harold Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, with Julie Sussman. It has been used as the textbook for an introductory course in computer programming for students of computer science at MIT, where it is known as 6.001, and at other schools. Now in its second edition, it is widely considered a classic text in computer science." 

Homophily in Social Software

Nathan Torkington - Homophily in Social Software:

"If you prematurely narrow in, you'll end up only showing them stories about melting Antarctic ice shelves without connecting to the rest of environmental, travel, or scientific stories that they're really interested in. The best way to make those connections is to mix it up.

Doing this creates serendipity: pleasantly surprising the user. For example, don't show just the top 10 most similar items in your recommendations list, but show the eight most similar and two from the mid-range. Or call the "less relevant but also likely to be interesting" results out like you're advertising them: put a heading like "Take a walk on the wild side" or "Break out" on top and act like it's a feature you're offering, not a bug you're fixing.

Breaking out of the tight circle of self-similar recommendations is a feature."

Used properly, RSS boosts collaboration

Oliver Rist at InfoWorld - Used properly, RSS boosts collaboration:

"Microsoft's SharePoint push has made team-style collaboration a hot buzzword in Windows IT shops -- mainly because Redmond's made it so easy. Grab a template, add some team-specific content, spend a little time handling permissions and you can have a fairly sophisticated internal collaboration site up and running in hours rather than weeks. You can even open it up to specific users outside the firewall.

That's powerful stuff no matter how you slice it and certainly a competitor or collaborator to the Wiki wave flowing over the rest of the Web. But while RSS certainly fits into this mold, collaboration really isn't where we're looking to use RSS. Frankly, I'm all collaborated out."

Fontifier

"Fontifier lets you use your own handwriting for the text you write on your computer. It turns a scanned sample of your handwriting into a handwriting font that you can use in your word processor or graphics program, just like regular fonts such as Helvetica."

(Via Gina Trapani.)

Is IT on the rise again?

Ephraim Schwartz at InfoWorld - Is IT on the rise again?:

"In the old days, a company had to adjust its business processes to the packaged application. Now, due to SOA, a company can adjust the applications or services to the business processes they want. Along with this reversal comes the need for IT staffers who have the business acumen to organize these services.

Paul Brunet, an IBM spokesman for the Georgetown partnership, puts it this way: Instead of telling the CIO that it will take four months to program a service, IT staff must be able to say, “Here is the value this service will return, and we can bring this service to this market in three months and to another market in four months.”"

Sunday Blogging!

Scott Adams - Sunday Blogging!:

"No matter how much news I absorb, I am always left with some important questions of context that seem conspicuously unanswered.

[...] My complaint is that these things should be included prominently in the news so the ignorant and lazy viewer such as me receives the right context without working too hard. Without proper context, the news is misleading at best, and intentionally biased at worst.

For example, Iran has 25,000 Jewish citizens. The media made a big deal – and rightly so – about the president of Iran’s comments about “wiping Israel off the map,” and of his questioning the Holocaust. For context, wouldn’t you like to know how the Jews living in Iran are being treated? I know I can research that question on my own, but it seems like an important bit of context that was missing from the media reports."

Building Large Systems

Curtis Poe - Building Large Systems:

"OK, your code is well-tested. Your code is better designed. You have intuitive APIs that anyone can use. Most processes are automated to remove bug-prone grunt work. You’re well on your way to making a system that’s easy to use, refactor, and extend. But you’ve paid a price. You’ve front-loaded your costs."

Good Agile, Bad Agile

Steve Yegge - Good Agile, Bad Agile:

"With a priority queue, you have a dumping-ground for any and all ideas (and bugs) that people suggest as the project unfolds. No engineer is ever idle, unless the queue is empty, which by definition means the project has launched. Tasks can be suspended and resumed simply by putting them back in the queue with appropriate notes or documentation. You always know how much work is left, and if you like, you can make time estimates based on the remaining tasks. You can examine closed work items to infer anything from bug regression rates to (if you like) individual productivity. You can see which tasks are often passed over, which can help you discover root causes of pain in the organization. A work queue is completely transparent, so there is minimal risk of accidental duplication of work.

And so on. The list goes on, and on, and on.

Unfortunately, a work queue doesn't make for a good marketing platform for seminars and conferences. It's not glamorous. It sounds a lot like a pile of work, because that's exactly what it is."

AJAX Edit In Place

Joseph Scott - AJAX Edit In Place (EIP) With Prototype (see also related blog entries).

Varnish

"The goal of Varnish is to be a very fast, stable and effective light-weight HTTP accelerator daemon, by using modern and effective technologies.

[...] When we set out to design and implement a high-performance HTTP accelerator about a year ago, we knew that we could improve on the state of the art, but we did not quite realize how much room for improvement there was. A year later, we have an HTTP accelerator that can run at wire speed on cheap off-the-shelf hardware. The difference in performance between Varnish and our closest open source competitor is almost two orders of magnitude."

Watching out for our own security

Jon Udell at InfoWorld - Watching out for our own security:

"Desktop and server operating systems know, and can report, when you’ve logged in and what you’ve been doing. True, a savvy impersonator can erase her footsteps, but if you’re motivated to look, there’s a decent chance you can detect an intrusion.

Applications and services delivered through the Web usually don’t afford the same opportunity. If a failed password-guessing attack triggers a temporary lockdown of my online bank account, I have some hope that I’ll be promptly notified -- though I’m not about to try the experiment in order to find out.

But what if shoulder-surfing or a lucky guess yields up my credentials to an evildoer? Typically there’s no way for me to monitor the account for amounts, times, or IP addresses that only I would recognize as suspicious.

They should at least show me the last log-in time. A more complete view of all account activity would be ideal."

Rails, Databases, ActiveRecord and the path towards damnation

Ola Bini - Rails, Databases, ActiveRecord and the path towards damnation:

"Actually, the worst part with MySQL is that ActiveRecord have been designed based on it. [...] It is incredibly hard to get other databases working with Rails, and even if you do get them working, it will be slow. Really slow. Take Oracle. Oracle lives and dies by prepared statements. But there is no sane way to do this in Rails.

[...] There are much more important issues in database engineering than normalization, and lets face it, most Rails developers produce pretty crappy databases."

Ruby the Rival

Bill Venners interviewed by Chris Adamson at ONJava.com - Ruby the Rival:

"I don't know much about Rails other than that it has been well marketed. The Rails marketeers drummed one message over and over, that Rails helps you build web apps quickly. Everyone has received this message loud and clear. It was a very good job of marketing, in my opinion. I believe the message too, but getting a green-field design web app out the door fast is not the only concern people have. Integrating with legacy databases, scaling to a cluster of app servers, are also sometimes concerns, and in such cases other tools may be more effective than Rails."

Dokumentenmanagement mit Open Source

Interesting article on heise open / TN3 - Dokumentenmanagement mit Open Source [in German]:

"Dokumentenmanagement ist mehr als eine Technologie, es ist eine der Königsdisziplinen in der Unternehmensorganisation. Es setzt fachübergreifendes Wissen und ein Gesamtverständnis vom Innenleben der Unternehmen, Organisationen und öffentlichen Verwaltungen voraus. Dokumenten-Management-Systeme (DMS) können ein wichtiges Werkzeug sein, aber nur, wenn sie richtig eingesetzt werden. Was muss ein DMS leisten und warum ist es für die Open-Source-Community eine Herausforderung der besonderen Art, sich in diesem Umfeld zu behaupten?"

Google Revealed: The IT Strategy That Makes It Work

Thomas Claburn at InformationWeek - Google Revealed: The IT Strategy That Makes It Work:

"Lots of small, short-lived projects mean traditional project management software based on task lists isn't right for Google. For one thing, techies aren't very good at cataloging how they spend their hours. What they are good at, it turns out, is writing up a few short sentences or snippets about what they do each day. Those get compiled in a database along with periodic updates from project leaders about a team's deliverables. The project system tags the input by topic and routes to the appropriate people. "This is not hard AI," Merrill says. Still, who else manages workers like this?"

Linux will get buried

Tom Yager at InfoWorld - Linux will get buried:

"Imagine that your server room has a bank of USB ports, and that every enterprise application you want to run exists, pre-installed on a stripped, standardized Linux, and in a freeze-dried state, on a flash drive. Plug in a drive, and within a few milliseconds you have a self-contained instance of an enterprise application. If you need more database instances, put in a blank flash drive and tell the existing database instance to replicate itself."

Personality Traits of the Best Software Developers

Rob Walling - Personality Traits of the Best Software Developers:

"No one anticipates a catastrophic system failure by looking on the bright side. The best developers I know are experts at finding points of failure. You'll often hear them quipping "What could possibly go wrong?" after someone makes a suggestion to handle a critical data transfer via nightly FTP over a dial-up connection. The best developers anticipate headaches that other developers never think of, and do everything within their power to avoid them."

Amazon EC2

"Just as Amazon Simple Storage Service (Amazon S3) enables storage in the cloud, Amazon EC2 enables "compute" in the cloud. Amazon EC2's simple web service interface allows you to obtain and configure capacity with minimal friction.

[...] Amazon EC2 presents a true virtual computing environment, allowing you to use web service interfaces to requisition machines for use, load them with your custom application environment, manage your network's access permissions, and run your image using as many or few systems as you desire.

To use Amazon EC2, you simply:

* Create an Amazon Machine Image (AMI) containing your applications, libraries, data and associated configuration settings. Or use our pre-configured, templated images to get up and running immediately."

Round 2: Dial Tone

Tim O'Reilly - Round 2: Dial Tone:

"[I]n the 1940's there was concern that the telephone system was growing so fast that there wouldn't be enough operators unless AT&T hired every person in America. AT&T solved the problem by creating automated switching systems that, in effect, did turn every person in the world into an operator--without hiring them. The principle of dial tone is to create a situation where users can do something for themselves that once required the intervention of an operator.

[...] Once you frame the problem in this way, you understand that one of the challenges for IT departments and companies used to the IT mindset is to get the operators out of the way, and to build new processes that let users do the work for themselves. You also can ask yourself, where is dial tone going next?"

Library Apps for Macintosh

Joel Spolsky - Library Apps for Macintosh:

"I really want to be able to shelve our books according to their Library of Congress card catalog number. When you do this, books on similar topics tend to wind up near each other on the shelves. This is a very useful feature if you don't know the exact title you're looking for, or if you just want to, for example, browse a bunch of books about Ruby to find one you like.

Somebody has gone to a lot of trouble choosing a card catalog number that put similar books next to each other, and I've always found that open-shelved libraries with books in order according to some reasonable card catalog system are far superior to libraries with books in order according to acquisition date, size, color, IQ, or IDENTITY column."

SiteScape Forum ZX

"SiteScape Forum ZX lets you choose from a comprehensive range of built-in features like shared calendars, instant messaging, chat, threaded discussions, and team workspaces. Plus ready-to-use workflow automation for everyday tasks, extensive portal support, and much more."

Novell AppArmor

"Looking to beef up your application security? Take a look at Novell AppArmor, a Linux application security framework included with SUSE Linux Enterprise 10. AppArmor gives you network application security via mandatory access control for programs, protecting against the exploitation of software flaws and compromised systems. AppArmor includes everything you need to provide effective containment for programs (including those that run as root) to thwart attempted exploits and even zero-day attacks."

See also Chris Brown at Linux.com - Protect your applications with AppArmor.

Traction TeamPage

Traction® TeamPage™ and Communicator™ Features ("Enterprise Blog Software"):

"You can create any number of category labels in each project. The labels from one project may be applied to content in any other project. Labels may be applied at the article level, or on individual paragraphs to call out key information buried in text.

Traction keeps a record of all label changes so, for example, you can track when a paragraph labeled "To Do" label was relabeled Done. This facility also lets you evolve a taxonomy over time, changing labels as needed; Traction lets you rewind the labels to reflect any point or period in time.

[...] Traction is a true journaling technology, with best of class audit trail capability. The audit trail includes a full trail of all posts, edits, comments, label changes, emails sent out, and other activities. It's possible to look at Traction from any time period or perspective. Attachments are maintained in the WebDAV document store and may be versioned selectively or you can set mandatory versioning."

How Amazon/AMT can change the internet economy

BPAndrew - How Amazon/AMT can change the internet economy:

"This post is an “out there” idea based on top of Amazon Mechanical Turk (don’t bother reading this is until you know how AMT works) which in some regards is already an “out there” idea. I have no doubt that following system can change the internet economy from its existing state as an ad/referral model to a collective pool of people supporting each other.

[...] You’ve heard of SHAREWARE, what about the concept of WORKWARE (people perform a few micro tasks in your name to pay for the right to use it). I see this concept changing the business model of anything from file download sites to the independent game industry / open source community."

Apple Leopard Server Sneak Peek: Wiki Server

"Leopard Server includes a Wiki Server to make it easy for teams to create and distribute information through their own shared Intranet website. For the first time, all members of a workgroup can easily create or edit content right from their browser. With a few clicks, or by dragging and dropping, they can upload files and images, track changes, assign keywords, hyper-link pages, view and contribute to shared calendars and blogs, and search for content on the group Intranet."

Apple Mac OS X Leopard Sneak Peek: Time Machine

"With Time Machine, you can restore your whole system from any past backups and peruse the past with ease. Can’t find a file you want? Enter Time Machine’s time-based browser to see a snapshot of how your entire system looked on any given day — file by file. When you find the file you want, just select it and restore it. Time Machine brings it into the present. You can do the same with a group of files, whole folders, even your entire system. With a single click."

How to Present to Investors

Paul Graham - How to Present to Investors:

"The biggest fear of investors looking at early stage startups is that you've built something based on your own a priori theories of what the world needs, but that no one will actually want. So it's good if you can talk about problems specific users have and how you solve them.

Greg Mcadoo said one thing Sequoia looks for is the "proxy for demand." What are people doing now, using inadequate tools, that shows they need what you're making?"

Google Internals Talk

Lyz Krumbach - Google Internals Talk:

"This Google Internals talk takes you through the basics of how Google uses their approximately 450,000 servers to run everything from Google search to GMail worldwide. The slides are based on information gathered from reliable Google sources, including talks given by Google staff, and gives you a very basic framework for understanding what is “under the hood” over at Google."

Project Management by Dummies

Curtis Poe - Project Management by Dummies:

"In economics, search costs are the costs of acquiring information. Whether you pay for it, research it in books or on the Web or just discover it for yourself, the more time you spend searching for information the less time you have to develop your product. How many times have you had a project blocked while you’re waiting for information?

[...] One fun trick you can use to verify the importance of lowering search costs is to have a developer sit down with someone who is actually going to use the product being developed. [...] I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard of developers who’ve sat down with a customer and walked away being able to make a much better product. They went to the source of information and lowered their search costs."

Stiff asks, great programmers answer

Jarosław Rzeszótko - Stiff asks, great programmers answer:

"Steve Yegge: [...] You’ll never make it very far as a programmer in any field unless you can get your ideas across to people effectively. Programmers should read voraciously, practice writing, take writing courses, and even practice at public speaking."

OSCON - Open Data

Tim Bray - OSCON - Open Data:

"At the end of the day, information outlives software and transcends software and is more valuable than software. I think any online service can call itself “Open” if it makes, and lives up to, this commitment: Any data that you give us, we’ll let you take away again, without withholding anything, or encoding it in a proprietary format, or claiming any intellectual-property rights whatsoever.

It seems to me that if you don’t have that, you have nothing, and if you do have it, you have, if not everything, at least a solid foundation to build on."

CouchDb

"What CouchDb is:

• * A stand-alone document store, accessible via XML REST.
• * Ad-hoc and schema-free with a flat address space.
• * Distributed, featuring robust, incremental replication with bi-directional conflict detection and resolution.
• * Query-able and index-able, featuring a table oriented reporting engine with a simplified formula query language.

The CouchDb data model was partially inspired by the Lotus Notes and Domino backend."

Update: Harry Fuecks at SitePoint - CouchDb: document oriented persistence.

When Amateurs Roamed the Earth

Tim O'Reilly cites a NY Times article - When Amateurs Roamed the Earth:

"Before box cameras became universal a century or so ago, people drew for pleasure but also because it was the best way to preserve a cherished sight, a memory, just as people played an instrument or sang if they wanted to hear music at home because there were no record players or radios. Amateurism was a virtue, and the time and effort entailed in learning to draw, as with playing the piano, enhanced its desirability.

[...] With the arts, American adults have acquiesced to playing the passive role of receivers....So it is with classical music, painting and drawing, professional renditions of which are now so widely available that most people probably can’t or don’t imagine there’s any point in bothering to do these things themselves."

The Databox

Tim Bray - The Databox:

"Occasionally, one of the disks might fail. When this happens, you won’t lose any data, but a red light on the Databox will start flashing, and it will send mail to a few designated addresses. When this happens, it’s exactly like when your laser printer starts saying “You need to replace the cyan ink” or “You need to buy a new printer drum”; next time you go shopping, you swing by Best Buy or Costco and pick up another disk unit. When you get home, you open the top of the Databox, pull out the disk with the red LED turned on, drop in the new one, and toss out the old one."

Product management bug is spreading

David L. Margulius at InfoWorld - Product management bug is spreading:

"Enterprise IT is making a transition from build-to-order (“order taker”) and mass manufacturer (“any color you want as long as it’s black”) to being a service provider responsible for delivering flexible, configurable platforms and applications. The only way to do that is with a product management culture driven by people who are compulsive about customer-needs data, adamant about optimizing the cost/quality/speed tradeoffs in the product road map, paranoid about competitors, and of course, entrepreneurial."

IM as a unified collaboration platform

Ephraim Schwartz at InfoWorld - IM as a unified collaboration platform:

"We all know that IM (instant messaging) is a tremendous time-saver, allowing you to make fewer phone calls, answer fewer voice mails, and send and receive fewer e-mails. So when I spoke with Dave Marshak, director of IBM Lotus collaboration technology, on the occasion of the upcoming release of Lotus Sametime 7.5, I wanted to know what’s next: How will IM’s collaborative capabilities be extended once the enterprise adopts it?"

The new intranet: wikis and RSS?

Toby Ward - The new intranet: wikis and RSS?:

"Knowledge is shared and managed every day in every organization – it’s just not managed very well. And effective knowledge management is more than just a plug-and-play off-the-shelf software such as document management – effective knowledge management depends on highly collaborative and sharing employees who are supported with the right tools and highly defined processes.

But let’s not confuse the intranet with a wiki. The intranet is all-encompassing; the wiki is just a tool or even an emerging platform. Wiki software is not the new intranet platform. An intranet requires too much integration and networking. The wiki may however evolve into one of the most important employee collaboration tools on the intranet, but it’s hard to imagine it replacing a search engine or a content management system."

Freedom To Leave

Simon Phipps - Freedom To Leave:

"If "interoperability" meant "import only", I'd never feel safe trying new things so market growth and innovation would be inhibited. People who implement open standards like this are smart, because although they allow customers to leave for greener pastures they also allow them to return - I am still using Bloglines despite the appeal of BlogBridge - and the confidence I feel over "owning" my data makes me a much more interesting customer.

That feeling is caused by more than interoperability - it takes full substitutability for me to have the confidence to stay as well as the freedom to leave. "

Can a federation tackle the data management puzzle?

Mario Apicella at InfoWorld - Can a federation tackle the data management puzzle?:

"Obviously, data indexing and search are prerequisites to analysis and classification, and handling those processes efficiently is a major requirement.

"Anybody can scale to handle billions of documents, but it's going to take a ton of hardware to do it," states Robert Lancaster, vice president of channel development at Fast Search and Transfer (FAST). "We can handle between 30 and 50 million documents on a single, commodity dual-CPU server."

Tech careers are on the wrong track

Tom Yager at InfoWorld - Tech careers are on the wrong track:

"IT careers require an understanding that the purpose of commercial computer systems is to serve people. Not to serve one another, not to serve database rows or HTTP packets, but to make people glad they’re using their computers instead of grappling with the latest work-around.

[...] I’m leaning toward the notion that American companies lowered their standards to ensure that they had no irreplaceable staff. A vital IT field is fueled by people you can’t afford to lose and workers competing to achieve that status."

Real-World Rule Engines

Geoffrey Wiseman at InfoQ - Real-World Rule Engines:

"For many developers, rule engines are buzzwords, or black boxes on an architectural diagram: something to be feared or admired from afar, but not understood. [...] Over the course of this article, I'll be sharing my practical experience with rule engines and with Drools in particular to support in-market solutions for financial services, in order to help you understand where rule engines are useful and how to apply them best to the problems you face.

[...] Although rule engines can be applied to just about any problem if you try hard enough, they are simply another tool in the toolbox. They don't replace constraint programming and solvers, artificial intelligence, workflow engines, decision tables or general-purpose programming languages; they simply supplement that set of tools with another."

On business/education partnership

Jon Udell - On business/education partnership:

"Thanks to personal online publishing and to an emerging cultural ethos of transparency, there is an exciting new possibility in the world. A young person today who is interested in software can find out what it is like to be a software developer -- by evaluating products, by reading the accounts of people creating them, by making contact with those folks, and by contributing to real projects. I hope it will also become possible for young people to find out what it is like to be a psychologist, homebuilder, forester, teacher, retailer, or city planner."

The Spread Toolkit

"Spread is an open source toolkit that provides a high performance messaging service that is resilient to faults across local and wide area networks. Spread functions as a unified message bus for distributed applications, and provides highly tuned application-level multicast, group communication, and point to point support. Spread services range from reliable messaging to fully ordered messages with delivery guarantees."

Bazaar-NG (bzr)

"Bazaar-NG is a decentralized revision control system designed to be easy for developers and end users alike. Decentralized revision control systems give people the ability to work over the internet using the bazaar development model."

The virtualization myth

Tom Yager at InfoWorld - The virtualization myth:

"If I were still working in IT, I’d declare that any software solution pitched to me could not get through my door as a stack of install discs, a quick start guide, and a “give me a call if you run into any trouble.”

Leave me with a DVD that has a VM image I can copy to my local drive and execute with the OS’s default virtualization engine.

[...] I would have taken a lot more demos from vendors, and taken looks at a lot more intermediate builds if I could have just double-clicked on a virtual disk image with 100 percent certainty that the OS and application would just run."

The Development Abstraction Layer

Joel Spolsky - The Development Abstraction Layer:

"A programmer is most productive with a quiet private office, a great computer, unlimited beverages, an ambient temperature between 68 and 72 degrees (F), no glare on the screen, a chair that's so comfortable you don't feel it, an administrator that brings them their mail and orders manuals and books, a system administrator who makes the Internet as available as oxygen, a tester to find the bugs they just can't see, a graphic designer to make their screens beautiful, a team of marketing people to make the masses want their products, a team of sales people to make sure the masses can get these products, some patient tech support saints who help customers get the product working and help the programmers understand what problems are generating the tech support calls, and about a dozen other support and administrative functions which, in a typical company, add up to about 80% of the payroll."

Polarion for Subversion

"Polarion® for Subversion - Software Lifecycle Management for Teams and Enterprises: At last there's a unified, single-source repository-based, web centric approach to software lifecycle management with just the right level of support for a project team right up to a large enterprise."

Doc Searls: Business as Morality

Nathan Torkington cites Doc Searls - Business as Morality:

"We can approach everything through one of three moral systems:

• Morality of self-interest. [...]
• Morality of accounting. [...]
• Morality of generosity. [...]

I think some of what we see in Web 2.0 [...] is the morality of generosity."

Why Big Software Projects Fail: The 12 Key Questions

Watts S. Humphrey - Why Big Software Projects Fail: The 12 Key Questions:

"The problem is that, with current software practices, the developers do not know where they stand any more than the managers do. The developers know what they are doing, but they do not have personal plans, they do not measure their work, and they do not track their progress. Without these practices to guide them, software people do not know with any precision where they are in the job. They could tell the manager that they are pretty close to schedule or 90 percent done with coding, but the fact is that they do not really know. Again, as Brooks said, "...programmers generally think that they are 90 percent through with the coding for more than half of the project."

Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work: 6 Lessons

Evan Robinson - Why Crunch Mode Doesn't Work: 6 Lessons:

"Workers can maintain productivity more or less indefinitely at 40 hours per five-day workweek. When working longer hours, productivity begins to decline. Somewhere between four days and two months, the gains from additional hours of work are negated by the decline in hourly productivity. [...] A hundred years of industrial research has proven beyond question that exhausted workers create errors that blow schedules, destroy equipment, create cost overruns, erode product quality, and threaten the bottom line."

Amazon S3

Jeff Bezos - Amazon S3:

"Earlier today we rolled out Amazon S3, our reliable, highly scalable, low-latency data storage service.

Using SOAP and REST interfaces, developers can easily store any number of blocks of data in S3. Each block can be up to 5 GB in length, and is associated with a user-defined key and additional key/value metadata pairs. Further, each block is protected by an ACL (Access Control List) allowing the developer to keep the data private, share it for reading, or share it for reading and writing, as desired.

The system was designed to provide a data availability factor of 99.99%; all data is transparently stored in multiple locations.

S3 is a very cost-effective data storage solution. Using S3's economical pay-as-you-go model, storing 1 GB of data for 1 month costs just 15 cents."

Entrepreneurial Proverbs

Marc Hedlund at O'Reilly Radar - Entrepreneurial Proverbs:

"I gave a talk at ETech on Monday called "Entrepreneuring for Geeks." I've given this general talk a few times now -- how can the more technically minded among us move into making companies of our own?

[...] Momentum builds on itself -- just start. Do whatever you can. Draw a user interface. Write a spec. Make something, anything, that people can see and touch and try. A prototype is worth ten thousand words. One you start moving, you will find that people start to carry you along."

Join the rat pack with PackRat

Giles Turnbull at O'Reilly Mac DevCenter - Join the rat pack with PackRat:

"What these webapps need are simple-functionality desktop equivalents that allow you to at least view your data, better still edit it too, and then automagically sync themselves with the online version the next time you're connected."

What Corporate Projects Should Learn from Open Source

Andrew Stellman and Jennifer Greene at ONLamp.com - What Corporate Projects Should Learn from Open Source:

"It is rare to find a corporate environment where the project team has anything approaching the level of planning, documentation, or review found in successful open source projects. For some reason, as soon as a budget and a deadline are involved, all of the lessons we've learned over the years and applied successfully to open source projects seem to fly out the window.

[...] However, it's well known that corporate projects routinely fail to produce quality software. or even any results at all! Many important studies have repeatedly reported that fact, such as the Standish Group's annual CHAOS Report (which as recently as 2004 has shown that less than one-third of corporate projects are considered successful).

[...] These principles, if adhered to, will help lead to success on any project, open source or proprietary. These principles are:

• * Tell the truth all the time
• * Trust the team
• * Review everything, test everything
• * All developers are created equal
• * The fastest way through the project is to do it right

Each of these principles is important, and each of them is routinely ignored in corporate environments--to the detriment of project success."

Dr. Macro's XML Rants

Eliot Kimber - Getting Started: Who the Hell are You and Why Should I Care What You Think?:

"I've made more mistakes than most and had my share of successes. I've learned a lot of hard lessons. And I'm just arrogant enough to think that my opinion has serious weight (or maybe more than arrogant enough--it's a tough quality to measure accurately). I've learned how to test software well and I think I've learned how to do good software engineering. I've learned, mostly, how not to totally alienate my clients and prospects. I've learned to bite my tounge when I really wanted to say something pointed. I've learned that the smile of a little girl at the end of the day is way more important than any line of code that might or might not get written."

The library IS the programming language

Sean McGrath at ITworld.com - The library IS the programming language:

"In my opinion, any competent programmer should be able to pick up a new imperative programming language in a couple of days. They are all the same really. Actually, deep down they are in fact totally the same. However, it is not reasonable to expect a competent programmer to be productive in application development after those couple of days. The reason being that real world applications are not developed primarily IN a programming language. They are developed primarily ON a platform - a library of pre-developed code doing everything from opening databases to drawing GUI screens. These libraries are, these days, behemoths. So big that competent programmers can and do spend literally years wrapping their heads around them."

Raving about Java EE 5

Graham Hamilton - Raving about Java EE 5:

"For Java EE 5 we had some wide ranging goals:

• * Eliminate common boilerplate. If millions of developers need to type something, it had better be both useful and necessary.
• * Focus in on "Plain Old Java Objects" (POJOs). In particular, get rid of unnecessary interfaces and class hierarchy clutter.
• * Improve defaults, so that the 90% common cases "just work".
• * Eliminate the need for deployment descriptors. (But still allow people to add them later.)
• * Emphasize "truth-in-source-code" so that source code clearly specifies what is going on. For example, you shouldn't need to read an XML side file to understand what some code is doing."

Why is programming fun?

Demian Turner cites Fred Brooks' book The Mythical Man-Month - Why is programming fun?:

"Finally, there is the delight of working in such a tractable medium. The programmer, like the poet, works only slightly removed from pure thought-stuff. He builds his castles in the air, from air, creating by exertion of the imagination. Few media of creation are so flexible, so easy to polish and rework, so readily capable of realizing grand conceptual structures."

Selenium IDE

"Selenium IDE is an integrated development environment for Selenium tests. It is implemented as a Firefox extension, and allows you to record, edit, and debug tests. Selenium IDE includes the entire Selenium Core, allowing you to easily and quickly record and play back tests in the actual environment that they will run."

Nagios 2.0

Nagios version 2.0 has been released...

How to avoid losing $199m

Paul Browne - How to avoid losing $199m:

"Like houses , projects need good foundations. For IT Projects , the good foundations are sound knowledge of the Business Processes being coded into the system. Changing processes and changing IT systems at the same time is like building on sand."

Mapping IT meltdowns

Steve Fox at InfoWorld - Mapping IT meltdowns:

"IT pros, it seems, put plenty of thought into software and hardware. It's mismanagement, office politics, and flawed processes that trip them up almost every time."

Watch out Java - Windows Workflow is coming!

Paul Browne - Watch out Java - Windows Workflow is coming!:

"The problem is then that the Business People (who understand the workflow) can't see how it is implemented in (hidden behind code), while the technical people don't understand the business process. Workflow (closely related to Rule Engines) aim to solve this problem."

Access control, monoculture, and accountability

Jon Udell at InfoWorld - Access control, monoculture, and accountability:

"Geer argues that access control lists -- although they’ll remain a vital ingredient of information security -- can’t take us where we now must go. The reason is that linear growth in the number of people you authenticate, or the number of resources you control their access to, or both, results in geometric growth of the matrix of checkboxes you must fill out. Every checkbox requires an explicit choice, and it gets impossibly hard to keep up.

The way forward, Geer suggests, is not to abandon ACLs but rather to augment them with aggressive monitoring that holds people accountable for behaviors that can’t economically be permitted or denied. ACLs don’t scale because checkbox maintenance requires a scarce resource: the human decision-maker. Accountability does scale because event logging and data analysis ride the favorable current of Moore’s law."

The blog as resume and autobiography

Jon Udell - The blog as resume and autobiography:

"Most blogs are more personal than professional in the sense I'm defining here. Of those that identify themselves as professional, many are pseudonymous. Of those that use true names, surprisingly few seem to take the approach I envision: narrating the course of a career, articulating its public agenda, writing its permanent record."

Innovation puts the blitz on mediocrity

Tom Yager at InfoWorld - Innovation puts the blitz on mediocrity:

"In 2006, I have little doubt we’ll see the soul of my brand of innovation appear again, which I’ll summarize in a phrase that might make you wince: Never take customers for granted. That’s it. If you adopt that as a mantra, you’ll either succeed and stay successful or you’ll go out of business because you say it but don’t really believe it."

Document or Perish

Steven Douglas Olson - Document or Perish:

"Writing is the technology that brought humans to the next level in advanced technology. Civilizations that prevailed in the past were literate. They could send messages, design things and communicate their ideas through their writings. For every Leonardo da Vinci there are innumerable inventors who carried their ideas to the grave. Writing is the power that can make your ideas transcend time.

Yet writing is looked upon by so many developers as a necessary evil.

[...] If the source code is “self-documenting” that means it must be bug-free. How are you supposed to know if a behavior is a bug or not? According to the “self-documenting” source code, there can never be any bugs."

Send plain text attachments as real attachments (Mozilla/Firefox)

MozillaZine Knowledge Base - Send plain text attachments as real attachments:

"Thunderbird normally sends plain text attachments inline, as part of the message body. If your recipient wants them to appear as real attachments add user_pref("mail.content_disposition_type", 1); to prefs.js or user.js ."

Leveraging the Web: Caching

Mark Nottingham - Leveraging the Web: Caching:

“The requirement was to make large-ish PDF files available on the internal network world-wide nearly instantaneously, with access control.

An external vendor had quoted a solution; it involved rolling out a pair of Windows NT servers (for redundancy) to each location around the world, each with its own database and custom-designed software that client applications on the reps’ desktops would connect to. The whole thing would be tied together with message queues and centrally managed.

Our exec wasn’t happy because the deployment cost for this was huge. […] So, when I wondered aloud why they didn’t just use Web caches, he got very interested.”

Splunk

“How long will it take you to recover? Will you spend hours finding your way through log files and other IT data?

Splunk is the new way to see inside the data center. It’s search software that indexes all your fast moving IT data as it happens.”

Analyzing Statistics with GNU R

Kevin Farnham at ONLamp.com - Analyzing Statistics with GNU R:

“Even for people who aren’t expert statisticians, the power of R is alluring. Working interactively or using an R script, with just a few lines of code a user can perform complex analyses of large data sets, produce graphics depicting the features and structure of the data, and perform statistical analyses that can quickly answer questions about the data. This article introduces R and demonstrates a small slice of its capabilities, using data from the stock market and real estate industry as input.”

Django

“Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.

Developed and used over the past two years by a fast-moving online-news operation, Django was designed from scratch to handle two challenges: the intensive deadlines of a newsroom and the stringent requirements of experienced Web developers. It has convenient niceties for developing content-management systems, but it’s an excellent tool for building any Web site.

Django focuses on automating as much as possible and adhering to the DRY principle.”

Selenium

“Selenium is a test tool for web applications. Selenium tests run directly in a browsers, just as real users do. And they run in Internet Explorer, Mozilla and Firefox on Windows, Linux and Macintosh. […] Installed with your application webserver, Selenium automatically deploys it’s JavaScript automation engine – the Browser Bot – to your browser when you point it at the Selenium install point on your webserver.”

Preview: Windows Workflow Foundation

Oliver Rist at InfoWorld - Preview: Windows Workflow Foundation:

“WWF creates a class of application that is rarely seen except when created through extraordinary effort: A distributed user-facing application.

From a developer’s perspective, WWF is a toolbox of abstractions for workflow-related activities such as receiving and sending Web services calls, taking conditional branches from an otherwise sequential workflow during the course of its execution, firing and sinking (receiving) asynchronous events and managing nested workflows. WWF abstracts and extends familiar paradigms in ways that change how developers think.”

Producing Open Source Software

Karl Fogel: “Producing Open Source Software is a book about the human side of open source development. It describes how successful projects operate, the expectations of users and developers, and the culture of free software.

Producing Open Source Software is available in bookstores, and you can browse or download it here.”

collectd

"collectd is a small daemon which collects system information every 10 seconds and writes the results in an RRD-file."

Architecture Astronauts Are Back

Joel Spolsky - Architecture Astronauts Are Back:

"When I wrote my original complaint about architecture astronauts more than four years ago, it was P2P this and messaging that. [...] Now it's tagging and folksonomies and syndication, and we're all supposed to fall in line with the theory that cool new stuff like Google Maps, Wikipedia, and Del.icio.us are somehow bigger than the sum of their parts. The Long Tail! Attention Economy! Creative Commons! Peer production! Web 2.0!"

Making a routine of citizen journalism

Jon Udell at InfoWorld.com - Making a routine of citizen journalism:

"Google Maps and its brethren are frameworks we can use to correlate online data and services with locations in the physical world. GPS, phone, and data networks can supply the locations. We just need to work out a few kinks. Cameras need to know their locations and encode them in the images they write. [...]

Eventually, the gathering of basic documentary evidence won't be, in and of itself, a special act of citizen journalism. It will just be routine. With lots of eyes and ears on the ground, and a network to connect them, everyone - first responders, journalists, and citizens alike - will cope better with crises."

VMware Player and Virtual Machine Center

"VMware Player is free software that enables PC users to easily run any virtual machine on a Windows or Linux PC. VMware Player runs virtual machines created by VMware Workstation, GSX Server or ESX Server."

"VMTN's collection of pre-built virtual machines from industry-leading ISV and open source partners simplifies software packaging, distribution, and deployment. Instead of spending time installing and configuring applications, developers and QA teams can now focus their efforts on development and testing.

To download any pre-built virtual machines below, you will need to register and download from each partner's site. Then to run these virtual machines with the application software pre-installed and configured, simply download and install the free VMware Player."

Core Data as a Cheap Database

Mac Geekery - Core Data as a Cheap Database:

"Core Data is easy enough non-programmers can handle a basic database with it. No, really, it is. Let's go through a simple no-code project to log phone calls."

The Zing in Zimbra

Nathan Torkington - The Zing in Zimbra:

"The server platform is the Microsoft Exchange killer we've all wanted. There's an ocean of people who want the Exchange feature set without the Exchange nightmares: administration, performance, and security. The folks at Zimbra have released it as open source, not just the Ajax client and the toolkit used to build it, but the server as well. [...] The Zimbra server ties together Postfix, MySQL, OpenLDAP, Tomcat, and more, building an integrated platform out of what used to be a patchy chaotic mix of protocols, libraries, and file formats."

OpenLogos

"The LOGOS Machine translation system is one of the largest and most powerful among the commercial machine translation systems. [...] The open source version of LOGOS will be available under the name OpenLogos. [...] It is planned to release the OpenLogos code base after final approval by the LOGOS owners, GlobalWare AG, by midst of October through their download page at http://www.logos-mt.com."

Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years

Peter Norvig - Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years:

“Why is everyone in such a rush?
Walk into any bookstore, and you’ll see how to Teach Yourself Java in 7 Days alongside endless variations offering to teach Visual Basic, Windows, the Internet, and so on in a few days or hours. […] The conclusion is that either people are in a big rush to learn about computers, or that computers are somehow fabulously easier to learn than anything else. There are no books on how to learn Beethoven, or Quantum Physics, or even Dog Grooming in a few days. […]

Researchers (Hayes, Bloom) have shown it takes about ten years to develop expertise in any of a wide variety of areas, including chess playing, music composition, painting, piano playing, swimming, tennis, and research in neuropsychology and topology. There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music.”

I’m wikied out

François Joseph de Kermadec - I’m wikied out:

“Wikis and Forums are awesome. They allow the community to improve the documentation, build upon it, provide feedback to the developer. But they cannot replace the documentation. By definition, a Wiki is written by someone who feels comfortable enough with the application to need “tips", forums require long searches to extract information: none of these wonderful concepts can replace linear, logically organized documentation.”

PostgreSQL Gotchas

PostgreSQL Gotchas:

“PostgreSQL is a fully-featured, robust open-source database with strong SQL standards compliancy. As with all RDBMS products it has its odd little idiosyncracies, which while documented, are not obvious, counter-intuitive or just head-scratchingly odd.”

I’ve already run into some of the problems described there - “unquoted object names fold to lower case", and “COUNT(*) very slow".

Time for a stand-down review

Roger A. Grimes at InfoWorld - Time for a stand-down review:

“I propose that one of the best cost/benefit security moves any company can make is to take a step back, review the current security configuration of its assets, and fix the basics before looking into more advanced solutions. Spending a week or two doing this can provide immediate returns, compared with waiting for a three-year payback on an unproven device or solution.

I have to admit that this idea isn’t my own – it’s stolen from the military. For example, every few years the military suffers from a spate of “random” incidents such as, say, airplane or helicopter crashes, accidental weapons fire, or unpredictable cases of post-traumatic stress. When management (the generals, admirals, or commanders) note a spike in such events, they often order a stand-down, which requires the entire affected force to drop all non-essential duties for the entirety of the stand-down period.

Everyone must re-examine current SOPs (standard operating procedures) to see if they need to be modified or, more likely, how they aren’t being universally applied. Either way, after the stand-down review period, the spate of random incidents always seems magically to decrease.”

IT's seven dirty words

Steve Fox at InfoWorld - IT's seven dirty words:

"IT has its own set of dirty words. Try saying any one of these in polite IT company, and someone will hand you a bar of soap to wash your mouth out."

Load balancing with balance

Costa Walcott at Linux.com - Taking a load off: Load balancing with balance:

"There are a number of open source load balancing applications, but one simple command-line load balancer, balance, remains one of the most popular available."

Decompiling Programmer-Speak

Tom Evslin - Decompiling Programmer-Speak:

"Computers have changed; programming languages have changed; but programmer-speak has remained remarkably constant. [...]

As a CEO or hope-to-be CEO of a technical company, it is essential that you crack the code. Otherwise you will have no hope of knowing when any particular piece of essential development will be done or even what it will do if it is ever finished. Today's blog is a phrase book of programmer-speak."

Hitting the High Notes

Joel Spolsky - Hitting the High Notes:

"Style. Happiness. Emotional appeal. These are what make the huge hits, in software products, in movies, and in consumer electronics. And if you don't get this stuff right you may solve the problem but your product doesn't become the #1 hit that makes everybody in the company rich [...].

It's not just a matter of "10 times more productive." It's that the "average productive" developer never hits the high notes that make great software."

Fairfaxfrontpages live

Almost exactly two years after Fairfaxphotos went live, Fairfax is launching another site I've done the PHP programming for, Fairfaxfrontpages.

The historical newspaper front pages are fascinating, take a look at Germany's capitulation in 1945, the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, the first man on the moon, or the fall of the Berlin wall...

IPTC Metadata for XMP

IPTC Metadata for XMP (IPTC4XMP):

"IPTC metadata were employed by Adobe Systems Inc. to describe photos already in the early nineties. A subset of the IPTC "Information Interchange Model - IIM" was adopted as the well known "IPTC Headers" for Photoshop, JPEG and TIFF image files which currently describe millions of professional digital photos.

In 2001 Adobe launched a new metadata framework called "Extensible Metadata Platform - XMP" and made it available in Photoshop (version 7 and CS) and other CS products. Photoshop also implemented a simple synchronisation between the - now "legacy" - IPTC headers and metadata elements of the XMP framework which works back and forth.

In 2004 a joint effort of the IPTC, Adobe and IDEAlliance started to work on

* the "IPTC Core" Schema for XMP for a smooth and explicit transfer of metadata values from the IPTC Headers to the XMP framework * a specification on how to synchronise legacy IPTC header values with the new "IPTC Core" - back and forth."

Top Ten Data Crunching Tips and Tricks

Greg Wilson at ONLamp.com - Top Ten Data Crunching Tips and Tricks:

"Every day, all over the world, programmers have to recycle legacy data, translate from one vendor's proprietary format into another's, check configuration files, and yank data out of web server logs. This kind of programming is usually called data crunching, and while it's not glamorous, knowing how to do it with the least amount of effort can make the difference between meeting a deadline and making another pot of coffee. These ten tips will take the headache out of crunching data."

What's the worst bug you've ever written?

Andy Lester - What's the worst bug you've ever written?:

"Then, after the candidate tells me the story of the terrible bug, I ask the crucial follow-up: "What did you learn? What did you change about yourself?" The reaction is often telling, and I can easily see how self-aware she is. If the answer is "We fixed the bug and had to do some cleanup," then I know nothing's been learned. If she comes back with a "I'll tell you one thing: I made sure that my X always....", I know that she's a self-optimizing person."

A Simpler Ajax Path

Matthew Eernisse at ONLamp.com - A Simpler Ajax Path:

"While not exactly new, the XMLHttpRequest object is receiving more attention lately as the linchpin in a new approach to web app development, most recently dubbed Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML). [...] As it turns out, it's pretty easy to take advantage of the XMLHttpRequest object to make a web app act more like a desktop app--while still using traditional tools like web forms for collecting user input."

Rich Web Text Editing with Kupu

Robert Jones at ONLamp.com - Rich Web Text Editing with Kupu:

"Kupu is an open source application, written in JavaScript, that implements a flexible, full-featured HTML editor that runs in a web page without any special plugins. Its primary use is as an embedded editor in content management systems (CMS), like Zope or Plone, where it allows users to create their own web pages. Its design is flexible enough so that you can embed it into pretty much any web application without too much difficulty."

Does IT demand too much commitment?

Chad Dickerson at InfoWorld - Does IT demand too much commitment?:

"For me, these particulars add up to an aggressively unhealthy culture that views family as an impediment to IT success. [...] Delegate some of the late-night work to a trusted lieutenant and use the time to help your kids with their math and science homework. You probably won't sacrifice any significant short-term ROI for your IT organization, and the longer-term ROI for your family is incalculable."

Another reason to be mad at Microsoft

Tim Bray - Still Needs Measuring:

"Except for, during the night, the guys from Microsoft went around, erased Netscape from all the computers, and installed Internet Explorer. I have some perspective now, but at the time I literally had to go outside the conference and sit down away from everybody, because I was afraid I'd do physical violence to the first Microsoftie I saw."

Extreme System Administration

Andrew Cowie at ONLamp.com - Extreme System Administration:

"Write user stories.

Jot down, in just a few sentences, what the user experience will be for interacting with your group, your systems, or some process interface you are creating. Share this with people--your team, your boss, and above all the people who will use it. [...]

Code test cases before the rest of the system.

[...] I think we can learn a couple of things from this. Certainly one of the biggest problems in operations is simply knowing when something has broken. If we can establish effective monitoring, telemetry, and alarm event notification systems from the outset, and make maintaining and updating those systems a rigorous part of our change management, then we are a lot more likely to know when a casual, supposedly unrelated change causes a problem."

Google News: Wie weit reicht Meinungsfreiheit?

Don't be evil, Google - stop spreading Nazi propaganda.

con:cern

"con:cern is a workflow engine based on an extended case handling approach. A process is described as a set of activities with pre- and postconditions. An activity is executed when its preconditions are met. It manipulates the process item, thereby creating postconditions. The process flow is determined at run-time. This approach is superior to the conventional process flow approach, if at least one of the following statements applies:

* complex process with exceptions and special cases * execution sequence is dependent on multiple factors * possibility of manual intervention of process flow * content-based dependence amongst activities * strong requirements to modularity * strong requirements to flexibility * loose process coupling"

Unison File Synchronizer

"Unison is a file-synchronization tool for Unix and Windows. It allows two replicas of a collection of files and directories to be stored on different hosts (or different disks on the same host), modified separately, and then brought up to date by propagating the changes in each replica to the other.

Unison shares a number of features with tools such as configuration management packages (CVS, PRCS, Subversion, BitKeeper, etc.), distributed filesystems (Coda, etc.), uni-directional mirroring utilities (rsync, etc.), and other synchronizers (Intellisync, Reconcile, etc). However, there are several points where it differs."

How to Start a Startup

Paul Graham - How to Start a Startup:

"In technology, the low end always eats the high end. It's easier to make an inexpensive product more powerful than to make a powerful product cheaper. So the products that start as cheap, simple options tend to gradually grow more powerful till, like water rising in a room, they squash the "high-end" products against the ceiling. Sun did this to mainframes, and Intel is doing it to Sun. Microsoft Word did it to desktop publishing software like Interleaf and Framemaker."

Creeping Mouse Syndrome Windows XP SP2

I knew there must be others experiencing the same weirdness: Experts Exchange says "after loading Service Pack 2 (XPSP2) the mouse cursor will at random start to scroll off the screen when there is no mouse activity." (Found via Computer Hardware Forum.)

Real Information Retrieval

Tim Bray thinks that what I studied is worth a lot; he calls it Real Information Retrieval - thanks :-)

"It dawned on me that now I work for a big company, and big companies have libraries, and sure enough, we do. It has a nice site on the Intranet where you can submit research requests, and so I did. Within a couple of hours, this intelligent librarian called me and wanted some more details on the numbers I was looking for.

Bearing my Bo Diddley experience in mind, I said "Instead, why don't I tell you the hypothesis I'm investigating" and he liked that idea and so I did. That was yesterday; today I find my inbox stuffed with big fat PDFs, mostly from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, that seem to have about what I need."

JavaScript Triggers

Peter-Paul Koch on A List Apart - JavaScript Triggers:

"CSS triggers are well known. The class and id attributes allow you to fully control the presentation of your websites. [...]

The behavior layer should function in exactly the same way. We should separate behavior and structure by discarding inline event handlers like onmouseover="switchImages('fearful',6,false)". Instead, as with CSS, we should use triggers to tell the script where to deploy the behavior."

What You'll Wish You'd Known

Paul Graham - What You'll Wish You'd Known, written as a talk for a high school:

"Now I know a number of people who do great work, and it's the same with all of them. They have little discipline. They're all terrible procrastinators and find it almost impossible to make themselves do anything they're not interested in.

[...] The important thing is to get out there and do stuff. Instead of waiting to be taught, go out and learn.

[...] The only real difference between adults and high school kids is that adults realize they need to get things done, and high school kids don't. That realization hits most people around 23. But I'm letting you in on the secret early. So get to work. Maybe you can be the first generation whose greatest regret from high school isn't how much time you wasted."

Keeping Your Life in Subversion

Joey Hess - Keeping Your Life in Subversion:

"I keep my life in a Subversion repository. For the past five years, I've checked every file I've created and worked on, every email I've sent or received, and every config file I've tweaked into revision control. Five years ago, when I started doing this using CVS, people thought I was nuts to use revision control in this way.

[...] I see three main benefits of keeping my entire home directory in svn:

• home directory replication
• history
• distributed backups"

Software stories

Giles Turnbull - Software stories:

"I hope more developers will start telling the stories behind their apps; it's interesting for anyone who uses the app, and can really help them understand little details."

Advice for Computer Science College Students

Joel Spolsky's Advice for Computer Science College Students:

"When you look at any programming organization, the programmers with the most power and influence are the ones who can write and speak in English clearly, convincingly, and comfortably. Also it helps to be tall, but you can't do anything about that.

The difference between a tolerable programmer and a great programmer is not how many programming languages they know, and it's not whether they prefer Python or Java. It's whether they can communicate their ideas. By persuading other people, they get leverage. By writing clear comments and technical specs, they let other programmers understand their code, which means other programmers can use and work with their code instead of rewriting it. Absent this, their code is worthless. By writing clear technical documentation for end users, they allow people to figure out what their code is supposed to do, which is the only way those users can see the value in their code."

Camels and Rubber Duckies

Joel Spolsky - Camels and Rubber Duckies

"A lot of other good technologies have doomed themselves with high prices: Apple WebObjects was irrelevant as an application server because it started at $50,000. Who cared how good it was? Nobody ever used it! Anything made by Rational. The only way these products get into the hands of users is with an expensive full-frontal sales pitch. At these prices, the sales pitch is made to the executive, not the techie. The techies may well actively resist bad technology with good sales that the executives force down their throats. We have lots of FogBugz customers who have high-priced Remedy, Rational, or Mercury products sitting on the shelves after investments of well over $100,000, because that software isn't good enough to actually use. Then they buy a couple of thousand dollars worth of FogBugz and that's the product they really use. The Rational salesperson is laughing at me, because I have $2000 in the bank and he has $100,000. But I have far more customers than he does, and they're all using my product, and evangelizing it, and spreading it, while Rational customers either (a) don't use it or (b) use it and can't stand it."

Protecting Your Enterprise Network from Vendor App Servers?

Slashdot - Protecting Your Enterprise Network from Vendor App Servers?:

"I work for a company with a large IT infrastructure. We have lots of applications in our environment. For a number of applications, vendors provide the apps, and provide core support to those app servers. Our vendors are notorious for demanding superuser access to the boxes that support their applications. To protect our enterprise network from attacks allowed in by well-meaning but less-than-perfectly-competent vendors, we have set up a quarantined network for each vendor.

[...] Frequently vendors can't restrict their applications to run on a limited set of ports. Most of the time they stare blankly when we want their application to run as something less than superuser.

Our biggest challenge is keeping track of all of the dependencies and managing what ports need to be allowed to which destinations. Of course, when security is tight our business-types say 'you're breaking my application.'"

Colophon - Dunstan Orchard's Panorama

Dunstan Orchard on his site's dynamic panorama header:

"The image displayed across the top of the site (for those using CSS compliant browsers) is a 1600 pixel-wide panoramic view from the top of my parents' house, in Dorset. The scene was originally captured as a series of photographs, before being manually traced in Xara X and Photoshop 7 to produce the cartoony version you (hopefully) see here.

There are ninety versions of this panorama, each depicting the same scene under a different weather condition, time of day, and (at night) phase of the moon.

Thanks to an XML feed from weather.com, and some PHP jiggery pokery, the end result is a fairly accurate representation of what my parents see when they look out of their upstairs windows."

dbacl

"The dbacl project consists of a set of lightweight UNIX/POSIX utilities which can be used, either directly or in shell scripts, to classify text documents automatically, according to Bayesian statistical principles."

Mac OS X Tiger: Core Data

Mac OS X v10.4 Tiger: Developer Overview:

"Now in Tiger, Cocoa can manage your data objects themselves through the power of Core Data, providing automatic undo/redo support, additional user interface synchronization, and data consistency, correctness, and speed enhancements when it's time to write to disk.

Core Data gives you the ability to create a description of your data objects. Once defined, Core Data handles most of the heavy work of managing your data objects, both in-memory and on-disk. This allows you to focus on application logic and avoid the infrastructure work. In short, Core Data is a model-driven object management graph and persistence framework.

In Tiger, Core Data will support three different kinds of files for storage of data:

* A text-based XML file format * A better performing binary file format * A high-performance, SQLite-based database file format"

JotSpot

Jotspot - a Wiki plus forms, e-mail + RSS integration, optional XHTML markup, file attachments. Unfortunately, it's a service (ASP), not a software you could install on your own server...

How JotSpot Is Different: "Using a simple scripting markup, JotSpot allows you to create Forms. Forms bring structure to your wiki pages. Forms define fields such as "text," "date," "number", etc. And, pages can contain both structured and unstructured text."

Novell NetDrive: Webdav client for Windows

Harry Fuecks: "NetDrive is a free client, provided by Novell, to allow access to Webdav servers from Windows, by mapping a drive."

George Bush as programming project leader

Andy Lester - George Bush as programming project leader:

"If the war in Iraq was a programming project, Bush would need to be saying, regularly, "I know things aren't going well, I know that you've had a lot of casualties on the team, but I believe we can get through this. Now, here's what we're going to do differently to make sure that we come out of this project alive."

Of course, if the war were a programming project, it'd never have gotten management approval in the first place. What are our requirements? What are our milestones? How are we doing? How do we know when the project is over? What's the timeframe for completion? What's the success metric? Is the iRaq project really the best way to beef up the company's security?"

Users care about data, not software

Nathan Willis - Users care about data, not software:

"In working with graphics editors, desktop publishing apps, and Web-based content-management systems, I find almost none that can export to anything besides its native format, and none of them makes even that simple.

Some developers clearly do understand the importance of exporting the data. Every new release of Gnumeric, for example, highlights improvements in import and export filters for the Excel format. And Quicken compatibility is a top priority for GnuCash. So why is it that so many free software projects let data import and export functionality fall through the cracks?"

Zebra

"Zebra is a high-performance, general-purpose structured text indexing and retrieval engine. It reads structured records in a variety of input formats (eg. email, XML, MARC) and allows access to them through exact boolean search expressions and relevance-ranked free-text queries.

Zebra supports large databases (more than ten gigabytes of data, tens of millions of records). It supports incremental, safe database updates on live systems. You can access data stored in Zebra using a variety of Index Data tools (eg. YAZ and PHP/YAZ) as well as commercial and freeware Z39.50 clients and toolkits.

Zebra is free software, available under the GPL license."

Great Hackers

Paul Graham on Great Hackers:

"Productivity varies in any field, but there are few in which it varies so much. The variation between programmers is so great that it becomes a difference in kind. I don't think this is something intrinsic to programming, though. In every field, technology magnifies differences in productivity. I think what's happening in programming is just that we have a lot of technological leverage. But in every field the lever is getting longer, so the variation we see is something that more and more fields will see as time goes on. And the success of companies, and countries, will depend increasingly on how they deal with it. [...]

If we want to get the most out of them, we need to understand these especially productive people. What motivates them? What do they need to do their jobs? How do you recognize them? How do you get them to come and work for you? And then of course there's the question, how do you become one?"

Using Blogs in Business

Chapter 8 of the We Blog: Publishing Online with Weblogs book is a great read.

Creating Custom Email Queries

Robert Bernier at ONLamp.com - Creating Custom Email Queries:

"In my last article on data mining email, I described how you could upload a Mozilla mailbox into a PostgreSQL database. With the email uploaded, I showed how to search through the email looking for text strings using both the standard SQL and PostgreSQL's POSIX regular expressions. As a grand finale, you then saw how you could extract Microsoft Word document attachments and perform text searches on those too.

In the true spirit of hacking, this article will consider the next step of data mining: performing in-depth searches on email by tweaking an existing mail system."

Trac

"At the core of Trac lies an integrated wiki and issue/bug database. Using wiki markup, all objects managed by Trac can directly link to other issues/bug reports, code changesets, documentation and files. [...]

Having a network of links between issues/bugs/tasks, code changes and wiki text makes the big-picture perspective of a project truly accessible at any time, and it becomes easy to quickly get up-to-speed on the ."

RSS growing pains

Chad Dickerson - RSS growing pains:

"As the popularity of RSS feeds at InfoWorld started to surge, I began to notice that most of the RSS clients out there requested and downloaded our feeds regardless of whether the feeds themselves had changed. At the time, we hadn't quite reached the RSS tipping point, so I filed these thoughts away for later -- but "later" came sooner than I thought.

Fast forwarding to the present, InfoWorld.com now sees a massive surge of RSS newsreader activity at the top of every hour, presumably because most people configure their newsreaders to wake up at that time to pull their feeds. If I didn't know how RSS worked, I would think we were being slammed by a bunch of zombies sitting on compromised home PCs. Our hourly RSS surge has all the characteristics of a distributed DoS attack, and although the requests are legitimate and small, the sheer number of requests in that short time period creates some aggravating scaling issues."

SQLpal for Oracle

"SQLpal - A free tool for Oracle DBA-Developers. As a replacement for SQL*Plus, SQLpal offers the following features: [...] - native windows user inteface - does not require Oracle client to be installed - does not require tnsnames.ora, instead just enter the host, port and sid"

Why Java Sucks For Sysadmins

Have some fun reading Jeremiah Weiner's Why Java Sucks For Sysadmins - I always wondered why "java HelloWorld.class" results in an error...

Apple Automator

"Automator contains a library of Actions. Each Action is designed to perform a single task, such as finding linked images in a Web page, renaming a group of files or creating a new event in an iCal calendar. Actions from the Automator library are added in sequence to a Workflow document. Each Action in the Workflow corresponds to an individual step that you would normally do to accomplish your task. The results of one action are seamlessly passed to the next action."

Joel: New web browser features for web application development

Joel Spolsky wants more web-app-developer friendly features in the web browser:

"In the previous rounds of HTML enhancement, the world's great graphic designers (like Jeffrey Zeldman) made the most noise and got us things like CSS which allow the kind of pixel-perfect page layout that the marketing people like, done in an intelligent way that separates content from presentation. Kudos. They got what they wanted, mostly, and quieted down. Now it's time for us application developers to start clamoring for the features we need to develop great web applications. Here are some examples of the kinds of features I'd like to see in web browsers."

Time to Dump Internet Explorer

Nothing new, but well-written by Scott Granneman - Time to Dump Internet Explorer:

"Look, let's be honest with each other. We all know this is true: IE is a buggy, insecure, dangerous piece of software, and the source of many of the headaches that security pros have to endure [...]. It's time to tell our users, our clients, our associates, our families, and our friends to abandon Internet Explorer."

Using Jabber as a log monitor

Brian Jones - Using Jabber as a log monitor:

"Jabber, the streaming XML technology mainly used for instant messaging, is well-suited to its most common task. However, Jabber is a far more generic tool. It's not a chat server per se, but rather a complete XML routing framework. This has some pretty far-reaching implications."

Tales of Optimization and Troubleshooting

Howard Feldman - Tales of Optimization and Troubleshooting:

"Whatever it was, I determined to find out what was going on. How hard could it be? What I found was not at all what I expected. The story was interesting enough that I thought it worth sharing. Perhaps you'll find ways to apply some of the principles employed to your own code optimization procedures."

Programming is like Songwriting

Derek Sivers - Programming is like Songwriting:

"As I get more and more into programming, I'm constantly struck with how similar it feels to songwriting. [...]

- It makes me jump out of bed at 2 AM wanting to try the ideas in my head to see if they work. - Being the programmer in the company is like being the songwriter in the band. You're the one that creates the thing that the rest of the organization is there to promote and support. - Most real songwriters and programmers would be doing this even if they never made a dime."

hiercat

"hiercat is an automatic text classifier which uses the hierarchical structure of class labels to improve classification performance. The model it uses is that of Gaussier, et. al."

What WordPress Does Right

Lauren Wood - What WordPress Does Right:

"So here's Lauren's Product Management 101, using WordPress as the example.

• It's easy to find out what the software does
• It does what it claims to
• It looks like people still work on it
• There’s some hope of getting help with problems"

Xapian

"Xapian is an Open Source Probabilistic Information Retrieval library, released under the GPL. It's written in C , and bindings are under development to allow use from other languages (Perl, Python, and PHP are working; Java will be available shortly).

Xapian is designed to be a highly adaptable toolkit to allow developers to easily add advanced indexing and search facilities to their own applications."

Amberfish

"Amberfish is general purpose text retrieval software. Its distinguishing features are indexing/search of semi-structured text (i.e. both free text and multiply nested fields), built-in support for XML documents using the Xerces library, structured queries allowing generalized field/tag paths, hierarchical result sets (XML only), automatic searching across multiple databases (allowing modular indexing), and relatively low memory requirements during indexing (and the ability to index documents larger than available memory). Other features include standard Boolean queries, right truncation, phrase searching, relevance ranking, support for multiple documents per file, and easy integration with other UNIX tools. The software architecture is also designed to permit proximity queries and incremental indexing; however, they are not fully implemented at present."

Bayesian classification using Rainbow

Fascinating stuff: "Rainbow is a program that performs statistical text classification." It can use Bayesian classification to automatically categorize documents.

Jon Udell tried it out last year: " There's been some discussion in the blog world about using a Bayesian categorizer to enable a person to discriminate along various interest/non-interest axes. I took a run at this recently and, although my experiments haven't been wildly successful, I want to report them because I think the idea may have merit."

Multibyte-character processing in J2EE

There's a lot to consider when dealing with multibyte characters in your programs - see this JavaWorld article:

"Most J2EE servers can support multibyte-character languages (like Chinese and Japanese) very well, but different J2EE servers and browsers support them differently. When developers port some Chinese (or Japanese) localized applications from one server to another, they will always face multibyte-character problems. In this article, Wang Yu analyzes the root causes of problems related to multibyte characters and provides some solutions and guidelines."

The pen is mightier than the laser

Andy Lester - The pen is mightier than the laser:

"In the World Of Business, there's no reason to bow down to the God Of Laser Printing [...]. Pen and paper works on the small scale, too. Extreme Programming uses the concept of the "story card", a 3"x5" handwritten index card that shows high-level tasks to be done. They're easily shuffled and reorganized.

Stop assuming that the computer is the way to go! Step back and consider what your target format is. Is it something you're mass-producing? Is it something that needs that "professional" look? Maybe you don't actually the computer to take care of it for you..."

Fundamental Issues with Open Source Software Development

"It's my Open Source project and I'll code what I want to." Michelle Levesque discusses Fundamental Issues with Open Source Software Development:

"I've found the five most important flaws with Open Source software development to be as follows: 1) User interface design 2) Documentation 3) Feature-centric development 4) Programming for the self 5) Religious blindness"

Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn

Short, but funny: Sam Ruby's Survival guide to i18n

"OK, so we've established that you've got a tool that you want to ensure is internationalized. The first thing I want you to do is to copy the string

Iñtërnâtiônàlizætiøn

into your tool and observe what comes out the other side. If you have a weblogging tool, put it in the title, summary, content, and any other nook and cranny you can find. Comments too, if you have got them. Check every output that can be produced, including html and feeds.

If the output comes out intact, you've passed the first test, and can go on to part two, cleaning windows."

Network Management with Nagios

Good, practical article on Network Management with Nagios by Richard C. Harlan: "John Deere had to expand network management across a diverse collection of hardware and software. Nagios saved the day."

Software for Information Professionals

The German Berliner Arbeitskreis Information compiled a directory of Software for Information Management (in German only).

Unnecessary Apache modules

Rich Bowen: "[I]f I was to pick on the most common unnecessary modules, I think I'd have to go for these ones.

mod_imap mod_mime_magic mod_unique_id"

Firefox fills the IE void

Microsoft Internet Explorer is dead, Mozilla is just so much better. This is not geek toy evangelism, it's the plain truth. In case you didn't know this yet, read Jon Udell:

"During Mozilla's long nuclear winter, I stuck with IE because I wasn't willing to live with compromises. Then the tables turned. Suddenly, IE was the compromise I could not live with. Bugs didn't get fixed. Standards support didn't improve. New features didn't appear. And the last vestige of cross-platform ambition evaporated when IE for the Mac was killed last year. The message is clear: Internet Explorer is dead in the water."

Le Fay

A totally non-IT-related note: I love Le Fay's bass guitars - take a look at their picture gallery! (I own an old Pangton.)

MOZiE

"MOZiE is an extremely light-weight, free Windows application that allows web designers the ability to compare page rendering in Mozilla and Internet Explorer by embedding Gecko -- via the Mozilla ActiveX control -- in an HTML page that sits above an iframe displaying MSHTML-rendering, running as an HTA."

Stale Page RSS Feed

Eric M. Burke: "What I have not seen, however, is a good system for preventing stale documentation. The concept is pretty simple. Provide an RSS feed for the least recently modified pages on your web site. Or maybe configure several parameters such as how many page views pages get, how many people link to those pages, etc.

Every week or so you could review the list of "stale" pages and make educated decisions. If the pages are still valid, just click a checkbox saying "reviewed, OK". Or, update the page or even delete it."

The Wiki syntax problem

Sam Ruby: "One key problem that we identified was the wiki syntax - both from a learning curve point of view and from a wiki tool lock-in perspective. It would be really nice if we could define a unified inport/export syntax that tools can use, either to PUT data to a wiki, or to migrate data from one wiki to another.

An obvious candidate would be (X)HTML, as every wiki provides some form of export to (X)HTML today. The problem is import: one should not have to implement a renderer comparable to IE or Mozilla to do a credible job. A profile or subset is called for."

Atox has a list of plain text "markup languages", pointing to txt2html - why isn't this format used for Wikis?

Dublin Core Metadata Element Set

"The Dublin Core metadata element set set is a standard for cross-domain information resource description." It consists of the following elements:

• Title
• Creator
• Subject
• Description
• Publisher
• Contributor
• Date
• Type
• Format
• Identifier
• Source
• Language
• Relation
• Coverage
• Rights

Why Tablet PC

Tim Anderson's "Why Tablet PC? The pros and cons of keyboards versus handwriting input and review of Acer C110 or C111":

"When Tablet was first launched I was unsure of the format's long-term potential. I am deeply wedded to the keyboard, there is a hefty price premium, and twisting a Tablet screen to convert it struck me as fiddly, gimmicky and likely to break after extended use. I'm beginning to change my mind."

Memory resident

Rich Skrenta explains why only RAM is fast:

"A disk head seek is about 9ms, and the human perceptual threshold for what seems "instant" is around 50ms. So if you have just one head seek per user request, you can support at most 5 hits/second on that server before users start to notice latency. If you have a typical filesystem with a little database on top, you may be up to 3 seeks per hit already."

WordPress

Looks great: "WordPress is a state-of-the-art semantic personal publishing platform with a focus on aesthetics, web standards, and usability."

The WorldWideWeb browser

Tim Berners-Lee on the world's first web browser:

"The first web browser - or browser-editor rather - was called WorldWideWeb as, after all, when it was written in 1990 it was the only way to see the web. Much later it was renamed Nexus in order to save confusion between the program and the abstract information space (which is now spelled World Wide Web with spaces).

I wrote the program using a NeXT computer. This had the advantage that there were some great tools available -it was a great computing environment in general. In fact, I could do in a couple of months what would take more like a year on other platforms, because on the NeXT, a lot of it was done for me already. There was an application builder to make all the menus as quickly as you could dream them up. there were all the software parts to make a wysiwyg (what you see is what you get - in other words direct manipulation of text on screen as on the printed - or browsed page) word processor. I just had to add hypertext, (by subclassing the Text object)"

Proggy font

Great programming font: Proggy! (Found it via Joel on Software.)

German city reveals Linux migration tactics

ZDNet UK has a fun article on Schwäbisch Hall's migration from Windows to Linux:

"Once the migration was completed, though, there were concerns that the open-source software would be harder to use than Windows. Again, Schwäbisch Hall had a solution.

"We put the chairwoman of our workers' council on stage in front of all the municipal workers, and showed her using the new system. After that, we found that no man would say that he couldn't use his PC now that everyone knew a woman could do it," revealed Bräuner."

Leveraging RSS at Disney

Timothy Appnel lets us know that Walt Disney Company is using RSS for internal communication:

"Internally, we are also leveraging RSS as a means of collaboration and communication for our software engineering teams. All engineers maintain blogs and use NewsAggregators to track tasks, projects, and new technology. In addition, we are tracking changes on our Wiki via RSS."

Writing man-pages

• Peter Seebach on Linux.com: What you need to know to write man pages
• Guido Socher: Writing man-pages

Six tips for better RSS feeds

Gene Smith: "RSS and XML-based content syndication are really taking off. News organizations (like the NY Times) and business are increasingly using RSS to syndicate their content. RSS is also becoming the spam-free alternative to email newsletters.

Most RSS feeds are automagically generated from a content management system. As more feeds spring up, and more content is consumed through an RSS aggregator, content producers will need to think about how to create quality RSS feeds."

Linux Documentation: What's There and What's Needed

Andy Oram has written a nice article on Linux Documentation which is also a good read when thinking about how to document your own software...

ISO country and language codes

Frequently used standards:

• Country name codes (ISO 3166-1)
• Codes for the representation of names of languages (ISO 639.2)

See also the ISO's list of widely used standards.

Nagios

Must check out Nagios. ONLamp.com has an article about Nagios: "Nagios is a feature-rich network monitoring package. Its displays provide current information about system or resource status across an entire network. In addition, it can also be configured to send alerts and perform other actions when problems are detected."

Please Sir May I Have a Linker?

Joel comments on the awfully large .NET runtime: "So Microsoft, wake up, get us some nice 1950s-era linker technology, and let me make a single EXE that runs on any computer with Win 98 or later and no other external dependencies. Otherwise .NET is fatally flawed for consumer, downloaded software."

Confluence

An interesting variation of the Wiki theme: "Confluence is a knowledge management tool designed to make it easy for a team to share information with each other, and with the world."

There's No Such Thing as a Web Site

I never thought of it this way, but of course Tim Bray is right in saying that There's No Such Thing as a Web Site: "The technology that makes the Web go doesn't have any built-in notion of a "site" or a "home page", even though that's how people think about things."

Here's his follow-up post, in which he is proposing a new HTTP "Website:" header.

Building an Address Book with OpenLDAP

It's been some time since my experiments with OpenLDAP... Now at ONLamp.com, I found Dustin Puryear's nice "getting started with LDAP" article:

"There has been a lot of buzz in the past few years about using the Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) for centralizing system and network information, providing cross-platform user account databases, and even for creating a single repository of printer definitions and configuration information. All of these uses are truly incredible, and they only go to show you the level of flexibility available with LDAP. Most of these examples neglect an important and obvious example--using LDAP for a company-wide address book."

Web Page Development: Best Practices

Apple has an article on best practices in web page development: "Before you start coding your website you must make a few decisions - which DOCTYPE do you use? Do you use pure CSS, or CSS with Minimal Tables? We'll discuss these topics, and then go into some design guidelines and issues to consider with XHTML and CSS."

The Master Key to Oracle's Data Dictionary

O'Reilly had a nice introductory article on The Master Key to Oracle's Data Dictionary: "Oracle's data dictionary views are all based on tables, but the views provide a much more user-friendly presentation of the metadata. For example, to find out the names of all of the relational tables that you own, you can issue the following query: SELECT table_name FROM user_tables;"

The programmer as (starving) artist

Robin 'Roblimo' Miller on NewsForge: "Writing software is fascinating, even somewhat addictive. People in the writing business are familiar with the phenomenon of "compulsive writers" who write not for money but because that's what they do. [...] The free software movement is full of compulsive programmers."

RESTful Error Handling

Ethan Cerami: "A major element of web services is planning for when things go wrong, and propagating error messages back to client applications. However, unlike SOAP, REST-based web services do not have a well-defined convention for returning error messages. In fact, after surveying a number of REST-based web services in the wild, there appear to be four different alternatives for handling errors. Below, I outline the four alternatives, and then provide my opinion on which option or combination of options is best."

Babeldoc

Babeldoc seems to have a sound concept. Excerpts from their Whitepaper (PDF):

"Babeldoc is based around the concept of pipeline processing. Pipeline processing is where an input document is subjected to a linear succession of processing. The document is successively transformed into useful information. Examples of this might be to convert a purchase order document from a client in CSV (comma-separated value) format to a PDF document ready for printing. There are a number of standard processing pipeline stages available and it is a relatively simple programming exercise to add customized processing by developing new pipeline stages."

"The Babeldoc journal is centered around the concept of a ticket. This is analogous to the ticket you sometimes have to get when waiting in line for a service. All tickets are issued by the journal. This ticket then accompanies the document as it traverses the pipeline and its value remains constant. All operations on the document are logged against this ticket. In certain circumstances a document spawns one or more child documents (for example, a file of many purchase orders getting split into documents containing only one purchase order) at which point the ticket is said to fork. A forked ticket maintains a relationship to the parent ticket. This kind of relationship can be queried and is useful for complex pipelines."

SiteMesh

SiteMesh sounds like a good idea (found this through PHP-Mesh):

"SiteMesh intercepts requests to any static or dynamically generated HTML page requested through the web-server, parses the page, obtains properties and data from the content and generates an appropriate final page with modifications to the original. This is based upon the well-known GangOfFour Decorator design pattern."

Blogs, homepages and privacy

Andy Oram points to a fascinating Swedish court decision:

"Mrs Lindqvist also described the work done by her colleagues and their hobbies in mildly humorous terms. In several cases their family circumstances, their telephone number and other information were given. She also mentioned that one of her colleagues had injured her foot and was working part-time on medical grounds.

Mrs Lindqvist was fined SEK 4 000 (approximately EUR 450) for processing personal data by automatic means without notifying the Datainspektion (Swedish supervisory authority for the protection of electronically transmitted data) in writing, for transferring data to third countries without authorisation and for processing sensitive personal data (a foot injury and part time work on medical grounds)."

The unpublished book on Microsoft insecurity

Jason Coombs on Bugtraq:

"I wrote an information security book last year under contract with Microsoft Press. The book was never published -- among other things it explains truthfully the poor security condition of Windows and offers detailed instructions and advice for defending against Microsoft's bad business practices and incorrect security decisions.

URLs for the free electronic book are: (PDF) http://www.forensics.org/IIS_Security_and_Programming_Countermeasures.pdf (Raw Text/PNG Graphics --> safer!) http://www.forensics.org/jasonc/iisforensics.zip"

InfoWorld: Open source citizenship

Jon Udell's question: "Is all take and no give the dirty little secret of the open source movement?"

"Flashline sells a repository-based software asset management system. He [CEO Charles Stack] told us that his customers indeed manage lots of open source assets in that repository. What they don't do, though, is share their modifications to the code. Almost without exception, he said, they fork the code to jumpstart internal development, never joining or participating in the projects whose code they've taken."

Browser war over: Microsoft lost

It's about time to say in public that Microsoft has been left behind:

While they went to sleep after releasing Internet Explorer 5.5/6.0, Mozilla and its companions have added so much value to the browser experience (tabbed browsing, blocking popups, selective cookie management, much much better security, not to mention Mozilla being cross-platform) that I'm not the only one who's stopped using IE...

Jon Udell: "Microsoft's browser isn't the only game in town. The truth is, I never use IE any more."

Eric Meyer comments on Adobe embedding the Opera rendering engine into GoLive: "GoLive users will get used to what Opera does, and may start to perceive Explorer as being more of an outdated and frustrating browser to deal with. It could lead to an interesting change in perception on the part of Web developers and Web authors."

SANS Top 20 Vulnerabilities

SANS Top 20 Vulnerabilities - "Top Vulnerabilities to UNIX Systems:

• BIND Domain Name System
• Remote Procedure Calls (RPC)
• Apache Web Server
• General UNIX Authentication Accounts with No Passwords or Weak Passwords
• Clear Text Services
• Sendmail
• Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP)
• Secure Shell (SSH)
• Misconfiguration of Enterprise Services NIS/NFS
• Open Secure Sockets Layer (SSL)"

CVSTrac

Quite nice: CVSTrac - A Web-Based Bug And Patch-Set Tracking System For CVS. Here's an excerpt from their feature list:

• Web-based administration of the CVSROOT/passwd file
• Built-in repository browser
• Built-in Wiki
• Very simple setup - a self-contained executable runs as CGI, from inetd, or as a stand-alone web server

The Nigerian SCO Connection

"DEAR SIR/MADAM:

I AM MR. DARL MCBRIDE CURRENTLY SERVING AS THE PRESIDENT AND CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER OF THE SCO GROUP, FORMERLY KNOWN AS CALDERA SYSTEMS INTERNATIONAL, IN LINDON, UTAH, UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. I KNOW THIS LETTER MIGHT SURPRISE YOUR BECAUSE WE HAVE HAD NO PREVIOUS COMMUNICATIONS OR BUSINESS DEALINGS BEFORE NOW.

MY ASSOCIATES HAVE RECENTLY MADE CLAIM TO COMPUTER SOFTWARES WORTH AN ESTIMATED $1 BILLION U.S. DOLLARS. I AM WRITING TO YOU IN CONFIDENCE BECAUSE WE URGENTLY REQUIRE YOUR ASSISTANCE TO OBTAIN THESE FUNDS."

Read the full letter at Ars Technica! :-)

Smileys turn 21

Nice summary of the "Joke" Conversation Thread in which the :-) Was Invented by Scott E Fahlman in September 1982...

Internet Explorer XMP JPEG display bug

Finally, someone else realises that there's a nasty bug in Microsoft IE related to Adobe XMP as written by Photoshop 7. Steven Frank writes:

"Windows versions of Internet Explorer, mostly 5.5 and 6.0 get thoroughly confused by a file that identifies itself as .jpg but contains XML. When you try to load one of these inflated images with Win IE 5 or 6, it spins endlessly, trying to figure out what to do. From that point on, you have completely lost your ability to view images in that browser session. Even if you go to another site. All graphics loading will spin endlessly from that point on. Only completely quitting and relaunching Win IE fixes the problem."

Marc Pawliger from the Photoshop Team comments on this:

"Microsoft and Adobe worked together to identify the problems Windows Explorer had with JPEG files that contained application-specified data. This problem appeared not only for JPEG but TIFF files as well. The latest XP service pack fixes the known issues related to Windows Explorer and these files, include some bugs that can corrupt such files and make then unreadable at all if you use Windows Explorer to edit the metadata in the file.

Note this appears to be a different issue than the one you are reporting about Internet Explorer being unable to display such files."

Steven has a follow-up post, where he describes the ImageMagick '+profile' option. He suggests using '+profile iptc', we're using '+profile "*"'. Unfortunately, '+profile' requires a recent version of ImageMagick (so older servers require a software upgrade to be able to do the cleanup).

Update: Peder suggests using jpegtran to fix XMP-infected JPEG images, because it's fast and lossless. Simply run "jpegtran -copy none infected.jpg > clean.jpg". (jpegtran is part of the jpegsrc package which you can download at the Independent JPEG Group, or get it from jpegclub.org.)

Another update: Microsoft finally seems to be fixing this bug, there's a Knowledge Base article pointing to a "hotfix" for IE 6 SP1: "SYMPTOMS: When you use Internet Explorer 6 Service Pack 1 (SP1) to view a Web page that contains image files, you may experience the following behavior: Some of the images do not appear on the Web page. Internet Explorer may no longer display images until you restart the program. CAUSE: This problem may occur if you view a Web page that references an image that was saved from Adobe Photoshop 7.0 on Macintosh OS 10."

Update: Here's some more victims of the IE bug, and photo.net has a long-running thread on the issue.

Update [2006-10-11]: If you're running a recent ImageMagick 6 version, use '-strip' or '+profile xmp' instead of '+profile "*"'.

Why isn't my time zone highlighted on the world map?

Raymond Chen: "The Indian government threatened to ban all Microsoft software from the country because we assigned a disputed region to Pakistan in the time zone map."

Online Demonstration Against Software Patents

FFII: "The FFII is organizing an online demonstration against software patents. We want you to replace the title page of your project's site with a protest page against software patents (for examples see below) on August 27th."

Tablet PC

A very nice and personal weblog on using the Tablet PC.

What Is New has lots of practical information on Tablet PCs...

Sheet music on the Tablet PC

Incremental Blogger: "I finally convinced Bryan to play hooky today and see what would happen if he tried to sight-read a fiddle tune off of my NEC LitePad Tablet PC. We downloaded some music in PDF format off the Internet, and tried using a mouse sitting on the floor as a "footswitch" for turning pages."

Møllerheimen Gallery

Nice pictures from Peder's home Møllerheimen in Norway...

Free Red Hat 9 ISOs

Here are the free Red Hat 9 ISO images.

Installing Oracle 9i on Mac OS X

David Simpson: "I've been an Apple customer since I bought my 128K Macintosh in 1984, and I make my living performing Solaris and Windows system administration in my role as an Oracle DBA. So it's been very exciting for me to see the introduction of Mac OS X and now the availability of Oracle 9i on Mac OS X."

CVS Frontends are getting better finally?

Dion Almaer: "What cool CVS clients do you guys use... and what do you think about the state of version control?"

André Basse : Photos

André's Photo Gallery - there's even some pictures of me:

• in motion
• at work
• in foreign countries
• under the bridge

Thanks André...

Fairfaxphotos live

Our Australian photo sales website project is now online: fairfaxphotos.com - shop there for great pictures by Australian photographers. It's running on Linux/Apache/Oracle/PHP and based on our Digital Collections DC4 system for storage and retrieval. (I did most of the PHP programming...)

The launch party started at 2:30 am German time...

news.google.com

Google News - finally. Seems to be just what I've been waiting for.

OpenGroupware.org

OpenGroupware.org's mission: "To create, as a community, the leading open source groupware server to integrate with the leading open source office suite products and all the leading groupware clients running across all major platforms, and to provide access to all functionality and data through open XML-based interfaces and APIs."

It's a formerly commercial software (SKYRIX) written in Objective C by a German company (MDlink)...

Jon Udell: Listening to my server

Strategic Developer: "The first server I connected to the Internet sat on the floor of my office, close enough so I could hear -- and feel -- its response to heavy load. It seems weird to admit that I relied on those sensory cues, but I've talked to enough system administrators to know I'm not alone."

Gizmodo : The gadgets weblog

"Gizmodo is [...] dedicated to everything related to gadgets, gizmos, and cutting-edge consumer electronics."

(Found it through Infoworld's Chad Dickerson's weblog.)

Wochenschau-Archiv

"[...] hier können Sie in den Filmen der Wochenschauen kostenfrei recherchieren".

http://www.wochenschau-archiv.de/

inmyexperience.com

Interesting weblog: http://inmyexperience.com/

Microsoft Reader

Coming back to the Microsoft Reader after some time: It's release 2.1 by now. There's free tools for creating OEB files (Open eBook) from XHTML + CSS + images, and for converting those into .lit files!

Microsoft Reader is the best solution I know for reading very long texts on the screen (PC or Pocket PC), much better than Acrobat.

Publish this weblog?

... yes, but which tool to use?

b2 http://cafelog.com/ bBlog http://www.bblog.com/ GeekLog http://geeklog.sourceforge.net/ MyPHPblog http://myphpblog.sourceforge.net/ Pivot http://www.pivotlog.net/

Python

Should take a look at Python since O'Reilly has so much on it:

http://www.python.org/ http://python.oreilly.com/news/python_success_stories.pdf

Information Architect

A new, beautiful word for documentalists? http://istweb.syr.edu/21stcenlib/who/architect.html http://webword.com/interviews/rosenfeld.html

Louis Rosenfeld is the author of O'Reilly's "Information Architecture": http://louisrosenfeld.com/home/

Package scanned pages in a single PDF

A simple JPEG -> PDF tool for the Linux command line:

http://tumble.brouhaha.com/

digicol@dcdevelop:/usr/local/tumble-0.32>/dot/local/magick/bin/convert -density 300 hires.jpg /tmp/dc4public/tumble1.jpg digicol@dcdevelop:/usr/local/tumble-0.32>./tumble -b "Agenturbild %F" -v /tmp/dc4public/tumble*.jpg -o /tmp/dc4public/tumble.pdf processed 1 pages of input file "/tmp/dc4public/tumble.jpg"

Tripwire

http://www.tripwire.org/ http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2003/03/06/FreeBSD_Basics.html http://www.onlamp.com/pub/a/bsd/2003/03/20/FreeBSD_Basics.html

Delphi embedded database

TurboPower FlashFiler 2 is now Open Source, speaks SQL, and can be embedded directly into the .exe file...

http://www.turbopower.com/products/flashfiler/ http://www.tk-datasoft.com/foundry/foundry.html

Dynamic file system

The WEB-DAV Linux File System can mount WebDAV servers locally:

http://dav.sourceforge.net/

Once mounted, you can share it over Samba...

Jon Udell's Weblog

http://weblog.infoworld.com/udell/

The Brick Testament

LEGO bible photo comics: http://www.thereverend.com/brick_testament/

Finale NotePad 2003

A new version of the free editor:

http://www.klemm-music.de/coda/notepad/

worshiparchive.com

Cool: Song texts with chords and a transpose function! (What about copyright??)

http://www.worshiparchive.com/

IRC

Setup an own IRC server for chats?

Here's a server: http://ircd-hybrid.com/

A Java applet for users without an IRC client: http://eirc.sourceforge.net/

A list of IRC applets: http://www.irc-webchats.de/

OpenLDAP

OpenLDAP setup takes a while...

Configuration files are in /usr/local/etc/openldap.

List all entries: ldapsearch -x -b 'dc=tim,dc=digicol,dc=de' '(objectclass=*)'

Create a new entry using a text file like the following:

dn: cn=Tim Strehle,dc=tim,dc=digicol,dc=de objectclass: inetOrgPerson jpegPhoto:< file:///data/00/00/00/616.jpg sn: Strehle givenname: Tim uid: tim userPassword: secret mail: tim@strehle.de mail: tim@digicol.de labeledURI: http://tim.digicol.de/data/00/00/00/616.jpg

Then run: ldapadd -x -D "cn=Manager,dc=tim,dc=digicol,dc=de" -w secret -f /tmp/newentry or ldapmodify -x -D "cn=Manager,dc=tim,dc=digicol,dc=de" -w secret -f /tmp/newentry

Helpful web pages: http://www.openldap.org/doc/admin/index.html http://www.heise.de/ix/artikel/2001/02/147/ http://www.yolinux.com/TUTORIALS/LinuxTutorialLDAP-GILSchemaExtension.html

SliMP3 Ethernet MP3 Player

An MP3 player streaming from your PC into the living room: http://www.slimdevices.com/products/slimp3/index.html

WAP example

Found a nice WAP example at http://www.wap-de.de/resources/examples/php/ .

This is how I want to access XDD (search for addresses, appointments, e-mails...)!

Update: This example inspired me to build WMLStart.php, a sample WML (WAP) application in a single PHP script...

ContentXXL

An interesting Content Management System? (Was the .NET success story in the iX magazine 12/2002...) http://www.contentxxl.com/

"ARD-Jahresrückblicke" 1952 to 2001

The German ARD have been summarizing the past year on TV since 1952 - all the clips are available online now!

http://www.tagesschau.de/thema/0,2046,OID1307088,00.html

www.zeit.de CMS

Apache 2, Zope, Xapian etc.: http://software.zeit.de/software/index

Samba Virtual File System

It's really possible - but maybe one should wait for Samba 3.0?

The "examples" directory in the Samba sources contains a "VFS" directory. Have a look at that README file - they've got a ready-made audit module, logging all Samba accesses using syslog...

And here someone built a Virtual File System based on MySQL tables: DatabaseFS!

German Christian songs on the Internet

http://www.neues-geistliches-lied.de/ http://www.feuerflamme.de/Musik/Lobpreis/ http://lobpreisteam.de/info.html http://www.pfarrer-pc.de/

(And my own project, currently in the works: http://www.liederdatenbank.de/)

Apache 1.3.27 and PHP Accelerator

Installed Apache 1.3.27 and PHP Accelerator.

No noticeable speedup. Hmm.

PHP Accelerator and DSO

More compilation tasks: Compile Apache with DSO support! And install the PHP Accelerator: http://www.php-accelerator.co.uk/

swish-e 2.2

A new swish-e version has arrived which they say is faster.

Indexing really looks faster, if I can trust my eyes?

ServerTokens Prod

The current Apache OpenSSL worm ("Linux Slapper Worm") checks the webserver version by reading the HTTP header before it attacks.

Added "ServerTokens Prod" to httpd.conf - now it says "Server: Apache", was "Server: Apache/1.3.26 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.8.10 OpenSSL/0.9.6" before.

(See the Apache documentation and FAQ.)

Creating PDF files

Downloaded the Adobe Generic Postscript printer driver as I thought I should be able to convert the .ps files into .pdf using ps2pdf under Linux. But the resulting PDF is absolutely ugly - images are missing, fonts don't scale...

Acrobat is expensive (> 300 €), Jaws PDF Creator is more than 100 € as well...

PHP 4.2.3

Upgraded to Apache 1.3.26 / PHP 4.2.3.

T-Online dsl 5000 MB?

The Telekom flat rate has just become more expensive - switch to the 5GB rate instead?

http://service.t-online.de/t-on/kund/anme/star/cc-anmeldung-1102.html

XDD trash can

XDD should move deleted records (including associated files) into a .trash directory.

Checking for open ports

Installed a cron job which directs "nmap localhost" output to a file.

This file is checked for diffs by our dc4status tool.

So I should be notified by e-mail when a new port is opened...

Faking POP3 mails with teapop

This is not yet working for me: I can authenticate through POP using my Unix account, but I didn't succeed in using .htpasswd files instead.